Hiring Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. Some learn from their mistakes while others seem destined to repeat their errors. As Human Resources professionals quickly discover, you must hire well if you are to effectively compete in today's talent driven economy. Hiring mistakes are not only costly, they are simply bad decisions for everyone involved, including your most productive personnel. Ask the wrong questions, conduct superficial background checks, and make quick decisions and you may weaken your organisation. Hire right and you'll build a strong, competitive, and, energetic organisation for years to come.

Often we speak about hiring the right person or the best person. Theoretically, you could find all the good candidates for a particular job, rank order them and identify someone as the best. Of course, by the time you did that, the best candidate would no longer be available, assuming they ever were. Instead, think in terms of the right candidate as someone who is likely to do the job very well, based on your considered assessment of their skills, behaviours, and motivation as compared to the stated job requirements. In that context, there would be more than one right candidate, albeit some will be more right than others will.

No one likes to make hiring mistakes, if for no other reason than the expense involved: recruiting, training, firing, and rehiring for the same position. The reasons for hiring mistakes are:

• Time pressures
• Lack of empathy for candidates
• Poor use of staff
• Flawed interviewing
• Inadequate reference checks
• Inappropriate staffing perceptions
• Over-reliance on technology
• Making Human Resources solely responsible for hiring

The pressure of time, having a hole in your staff presumably means lost productivity and placing additional workload on others. The need to hire someone can seem compelling.

Failure to see the hiring process from the perspective of potential applicants and candidates.

Drawing up needlessly narrow sources of new staff or using sources in a sub-optimal way.

Flaws in the interviewing process, including the failure to ask the right questions, listen to answers, solicit information on the candidates concerns, and provide the candidate with a realistic understanding of what his/her work life could be with your company.

Flaws in interview follow-up, including insufficient and ineffective checking of references and problematic offer letters.

Human Resources personnel and hiring managers operating under disparate perceptions of staffing and the hiring process.

A misplaced reliance on technology as a magic bullet.

The intrinsic uncertainty of any endeavour that deals with people.

Believing that the hiring of new people is a human resource function only.

One fundamental hiring mistake employers make is viewing the staffing process separate from the overall operation of the business. In other words, there is a tendency to consider recruiting as beginning when a vacancy occurs, and then tasking Human Resources to fill the position. A more productive approach is this: recruit all the time with every employee involved. Your company's name recognition and reputation are everybody's business and they influence whom you can attract and hire. Similarly, every employee is a potential source for new employees (or inversely, a potential barrier to attracting new staff). Everyone can co-operate in frequently updating job descriptions so that task doesn't begin only when someone leaves the company.

In some measure, the hiring process is caught in the tension between the implied loss of revenue when a position is unfilled and the potential cost of a bad hire. Hiring managers understandably emphasise the former while HR professionals are more attuned to the latter. The extent that time-to-hire can be reduced, there will be less pressure to hire someone / anyone without taking all the appropriate steps. Finding ways to reduce time to hire is an underlying factor.

While we can never eliminate mistakes completely, we can at least understand and minimise them in the future. Indeed, if we know were the potholes are in the road, we are likely to get fewer flat tyres.

Often the wrong people are hired due to the perceived need to fill a vacancy as quickly as possible. The perception has a basis in reality. It is much harder for a manager to meet his / her goals while being short staffed. The opportunity cost of sales not made, service not delivered well or research being stalled is considerable.

Some good staffing sources are often overlooked or poorly utilised. There are various recruitment strategies that can be utilised: employee referral programs, accessing older workers, and recruiting new university graduates.

Under pressure to hire someone, employers often bend procedures to expedite matters. These short circuits include insufficient checking of references and work history, disregarding employment test results, and yielding to internal pressures. Such actions can have negative consequences for the organisation. If your hiring procedures are valid and generally effective, stick with them. You also should be open to improving your current procedures.

The mechanics of interviewing can also be improved by not hiring candidates who are a clone or the opposite of the person who just left. The more effective approach is to evaluate candidates in terms of the job they will be asked to do and not in contrast to previous incumbents or other candidates.

Proper follow-though can minimise interviewing mistakes. Mistakes include not giving the candidate a realistic sense of what it's like working for your company, making it too hard to say no to your job offer, and lack of courtesy.

Whilst we hope that you will find our articles of use in your personnel management, we invite anyone who wishes to see a particular topic covered in the future to feel free to make your own suggestions.

Article prepared by Commercial Services Bureau (CSB) Ltd.

Since 1987, CSB Ltd. has been servicing the local and international business community with its range of employment/recruitment related services. It has helped thousands of employees improve their job conditions and careers, and employers obtain the ideal staff for their organisations.