As Red Scott said “Hire smart, or manage tough.”, no matter how hard you try to manage, there is no way you can turn a bad hire into a right hire. The true cost of a bad hire is always terrible including but not limited to wastage of resources, time and possible reputation damage. If you are a CEO or a manager, once you have hired the right person, then your job becomes simple, Brian Stacy emphasizes.
Now, the case emerges that some managers don’t know how to attract, acquire and retain the right people. A Harvard Business Review study found that 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions, and 45% of bad hires are attributed to a lack of process.
Here are some of the top four mistakes in hiring and possible ways to avoid them:
Lack of planning
Hiring managers don’t think clearly about their critical pain points and develop job descriptions based on that. Once a Researcher, Charles Kettering said, “A Problem Well Stated is Half Solved”.
Possible Solution:
As a manager, spend quality time to analyze the role, critical pain points and what defines success for the position. Think about what a typical day for a new hire would look like.
Vague Job Description
Boring job descriptions list skills, required experiences, academics, competencies, and personality traits, with a little about duties and responsibilities. This is more a people description than a job description. Top people don’t look for jobs based on their skills and experience. They look for jobs based on the challenges and opportunities involved.
Possible Solution:
Create a compelling job advertisement that attracts top talents to submit their interest. Make the job description the real job. Instead, define what people need to do with their skills and experiences. These are called performance profiles. You’ll use them to screen, assess, and recruit every one of your candidates.
Asking Clever Questions
Asking partial questions that won’t get the candidate to give the information in detail. Some questions are subjective too as a result they leave a bad candidate experience.
Possible Solution:
Treat the interview as a fact-finding mission. Ask role-tailored questions that dig deeply into a person’s major accomplishments to observe trends of growth and patterns of behaviours. Then compare these to the performance objectives stated in the performance profile.
First Impression Trap
Struggling to confirm the result of the first-minute impression. It’s easy to measure competency but don’t stop there even if the person is affable, outgoing, and interested in your job.
Possible Solution:
Don’t make hiring decisions so quickly, go deep into asking detailed questions and in the end make decisions on who to hire. To assess true motivation, you’ll need to look for multiple examples of where the person has excelled and the underlying environment and circumstances.
Brian Tracy once said effective hiring represents 95 per cent of a manager’s success. Start your new life with deliberate action, hire right. If you are still wondering how to do it, feel free to contact us at bettercareerproject@gmail.com.