We all make mistakes at work. It’s inevitable. However, some errors can have bigger negative impacts on your company than others. Hiring mistakes, for example, can causes significant losses in productivity, time, cost, and resources.
Hiring mistakes are actually very easy for hiring managers to make—and there are a whole lot of them that you’re at risk of making, too. Although there is no fool-proof way to hire the perfect candidate, these tips can help you avoid costly mistakes.
1. Create a Formal Process
If you don’t follow a defined hiring process, your hunt for a new employee could go on far too long, you could end up letting great candidates get away, and can end up allowing terrible applicants to slip through the cracks. To avoid hiring mistakes, it’s critical that you map out your hiring process and create repeatable steps for recruitment, hiring, screening, testing, and negotiating.
2. Identify Your Culture
Even the best candidate with the exact skills and experience that you’re looking for might not work out. A candidate who isn’t a match to your company culture likely won’t be passionate about what you do, enjoy working in your unique environment, or end up staying for the long term.
To avoid hiring mistakes, it’s important to identify your corporate culture—your business’s beliefs, values, environment, and missions that make you uniquely you—and find the perfect fit in a new employee.
3. Know Your Ideal Candidate
To avoid hiring mistakes, spend some timedeveloping a profile of your ideal candidate, including temperament, skillset, experience, communication style, and the role they’ll play in your company. This will allow you to craft a job description based on what you really want in a new employee. It will also allow you to compare candidates to the profile to see who matches.
4. Have a Deep Understanding of the Open Position
Just as importantly, you need to understand the open position that your ideal candidate will fill. Understand the fine details of the role, such as milestones and responsibilities, before you even start recruiting. You can’t possibly know how the right candidate will be if you don’t know what they need to be able to do.
5. Ask Tough Questions
Many hiring mistakes come from the interview process. Managers who only hire a few times a year often don’t have the expertise and experience required to interview candidates in the most effective way. Many will only ask questions related to the candidate’s work history and education, when this information is already known from the resume. Others will ask abstract questions like “what kind of animal would you like to be?” without really understanding what kind of answers they’re looking for.
To interview effectively, you need to ask tough questions that will help you see into a candidate’s personality, ethics, and style. Ask behavioural questions to tease out cultural fit. Ask about specific examples and present hypothetical scenarios to be able to see how a candidate would act in certain situations.
6. Don’t Rush the Hiring Process
The majority of the time, there’s an urgency to fill an open position. However, most hiring mistakes come from a rushed hiring process. When you’re trying to quickly fill a void on your team, you can end up ignoring red flags, settling for less than you expect, or not thoroughly vetting candidates.
Be realistic about hiring timelines.
7. Engage a Staffing Firm
Try as you might, you could still end up making costly hiring mistakes at any point during the hiring process. That’s why many employers look to staffing firms for their recruiting and hiring needs. Having hiring experts do the work can help ensure that you only hire the best candidates for any given role. Plus, engaging a staffing firm saves you time and money, too. It’s a win-win.
Contact Liberty Staffing to get help with your hiring process.