as long as all the values are dates, i am not seeing why Skip's formula would fail.
is it possible the field {Employee.HireDate} could have values that are invalid as dates?
that would be my first guess.
add something like this to the start of your date formula:
IF isdate({Employee.Hiredate})=TRUE then date({Employee.HireDate}) else dateserial(1900,01,01)
you can then filter out any dates that are equal to 01/01/1900 (and/or inform end users to fix the dates or whatever)