Hiring new employees, whether temporary, part time, or full time, is one of the most important functions your HR team must handle. Every hire comes with risks, challenges, and investments, as well as the potential for hiring mistakes.
Though hiring might seem pretty cut and dry—review resumes, interview candidates, and pick the best one for the job—hiring mistakes are actually incredibly common. Success depends not only on recruiting high-quality candidates, but expertly assessing skills and experience, weeding out mediocre and poor candidates, ensuring the hire you choose fits in with your company culture, and ensuring that they’ll be around for the long term. Making hiring mistakes in any of these areas can be devastating and costly.
To reduce your risks of bad hires, make sure to deal with preventable hiring mistakes, like the ones below.
1. Not Knowing What You Want
You simply can’t know if candidates meet the qualifications of your open positions if you don’t know what those qualifications are. If you’re using an old and outdated job description or if you haven’t really taken the time to consider what roles and responsibilities the new hire will be in charge of, you won’t be able to determine which skills, experience, personality traits, or degrees and certification candidates will need. You’ll end up finding out too late that the person you hired isn’t right for the job.
Before you even start recruiting, you need to detail the specific job requirements and desired personal characteristics to match against candidates’ resumes.
2. Hiring Friends and Family
When you own a business, it can be tempting to help out your friends and family members by hiring them. Plus, having them at your workplace could make your job more fun, too. Unfortunately, though, when you hire people you know, you might forgo the hiring process entirely. You might not consider whether or not they actually have the skills and experience required to do the job effectively. You have to realize that having a great relationship with someone doesn’t necessarily qualify the candidate as a great employee. Don’t learn this the hard way. Terminating friends or family members isn’t fun or easy.
3. Falling for Charm
When a candidate blows you away at the interview, it can be blinding. You can fall in love with the charm and charisma and this can result in a disaster. When you view candidates in terms of whether or not you like them on a personal level as opposed to paying attention to their strengths, skills, and experience, you could easily end up with a bad hire that isn’t right for the job. Never hire based on your first impression. When you initially like a candidate, look for reasons why they aren’t right for the position. And when you don’t like someone, look for reasons why they’d be great.
4. Asking the Wrong Questions
When you’re not experienced in interviewing, you might ask all of the wrong questions that won’t really give you the insights you need. Most hiring managers will just make the candidate reiterate the information on the resume, like their experience, schooling, and acquired skills. But you already know all that if you read the application. The interview is your chance to get to know the candidate on a deeper level to understand whether or not they’ll be a good fit within your organization. Take the opportunity and ask interview questions that give insights into cultural fit.
5. Not Having a Repeatable Hiring Process
If your hiring results are hit or miss, it’s because you haven’t created a proven, repeatable hiring process. Without structure, your hiring process doesn’t work.
Creating and following a repeatable hiring process has many benefits—it can allow you to ensure that your interviews are efficient, productive, and designed to recruit the best on a consistent basis, every single time you hire someone new.
