Hiring is a difficult skill to master, even for experienced managers. When you know that your employees are your company’s biggest asset, you want to get it right. You want a full team of highly qualified employees working for you, and you certainly don’t want to deal with the costly consequences that come with hiring the wrong person. A high turnover rate can cost you up to fifteen times a worker’s salary and lead to a lot of wasted time and resources.
It’s vital to your business that you avoid making hiring mistakes. It’s important to acknowledge if you have made bad hires in the past, so you can identify the problem and prevent it in the future.
To have the best shot at making appropriate hiring decisions that you can be proud of, follow these tips.
Be Objective
Many managers are subjective and emotionally charged when it comes to hiring new employees. They hire based on their gut—their instinct. Unfortunately, this will lead to bad hires more often than not. You have to be objective and base your decisions on data.
To do this, create your own valuation of who your ideal hire would be in order to measure what is most important to your company. Consider your top workers: what do they have in common? What makes them so great at their job? What qualities do they have? Why have they been with you for so long?
When you create your own metrics, you’ll be able to objectively weigh a candidate’s potential against skills and qualities that you know work within your company. When it comes to hiring, you can’t play it fast and loose—you need an analytical process based on facts.
Hire All the Time
Many employers end up making mistakes because they hire out of desperation. Someone suddenly gives notice and the manager is scrambling to find someone to take over—quick. When you hire out of desperation to quickly fill an open position, more often than not you end up settling for a mediocre applicant. You just want a warm body in the seat, and you’re not too worried about whether or not that person is actually the right person for the job.
To avoid this hiring mistake, you should always be networking with candidates, accepting resumes, and advertising your company as a great employer. Once a job opportunity opens up, you’ll have a network full of qualified job seekers to call up.
Focusing Too Much on Experience
Placing too much emphasis on experience can make you overlook the other important qualities that a candidate may have. Though experience is sometimes a great indicator of success, there are more important attributes to consider. Remember that you’ll be training your new hire to develop the required skills for the job, so it’s not especially critical that he or she have experience. Instead, you should be focusing more on the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours that will indicate whether the candidates are a good cultural fit for your work environment. These are the real indicators for success.
Engage a Specialist
If you’ve been dealing with the consequences of bad hires, it might be time to consider going to the experts. Engage a staffing agency to recruit and hire your new employees for you. A staffing agency will know where to recruit the best candidates, will have the experience and expertise required to spot the differences between top talent and bad apples, and understand what it will take to attract the best of the best to your company.
Plus, when you engage an agency, you’ll save a ton of time, since its recruiters will do all of the work for you. This route also minimizes your risks—if you’re not happy with your new hire, you can say so, and the recruiter will find you a new worker.
