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Four Articles That Help You Avoid Hiring Disaster
Thursday, January 26th, 2017
Building a great company with a great culture has everything to do with hiring the best people possible. David K. Williams wrote in a 2012 Forbes article that a bad hire can cost a company anywhere from $25,000-$50,000+. This doesn’t take into account the ripple effect of low morale and lost productivity.
Getting informed on better and best hiring practices can help your company avoid many of the pitfalls that can be so costly in searching for a great employee. Here are five great articles to help you in your search.
In the hunt for quality candidates, it’s a seller’s market. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco University, said, “The power has shifted from the company to the candidate. They now have choices.” Want Quality Talent? Hire Faster is an article that explores this strategy and offers three ways to streamline the process.
The person in charge of hiring gets more involved in the entire process and gathers potential candidates even between hiring periods.
Streamline interviews, focusing only on hypothetical scenarios and behavioral descriptions
If you have a lot of steps in your hiring process (i.e. resume submittal, application with redundant questions, phone interview, in-person interview, interview with higher-ups, background check, etc. etc.) try to remove some of the steps. Other companies probably move faster and that puts you at a disadvantage.
This article explains that personality fit is even more important than skillset or experience. Of course, experience matters, but if you have the most skilled and talented person in the world who can’t get along with others, you have a major issue on your hands. Hiring managers often express their interest in getting to know the person to see how cooperative, polite, and socially aware the candidate is. Some even ask for the candidate to complete a personality test. This is necessarily recommended in all cases, but it shows how important this is.
This article gives a unique perspective on why companies have been struggling with improving quality of hire for so many years. Adler asserts that the problems lie in focusing too much on generic skills and competencies, ill-defined jobs for hiring purposes, and indirect interviewing and assessment techniques. According to Adler, what will really help employers in their search for quality employees is using a performance-based hiring process. From how to better write a job description to modifying positions to fit the top people, these 11 tips will help you overcome your quality of hire struggles.
Sometimes we trust candidates a bit too much. Job seekers may take advantage of that fact and fib on their resumes, references, education. Most companies ask job applicants for references, but unfortunately, many employers don’t use them to their fullest potential. This article is an extremely helpful guide on how to use references most effectively, beginning with using them the old-fashioned (non-computer) way.
“To be effective, the process requires intuition, common sense, extraordinary listening skills and the ability to combine various comments in a way that accurately portrays the candidate’s suitability for the position. In other words, people need to talk to each other.”
One bad hire based on false information will be enough to convince you that doing your homework on a candidate is essential.
Be Competitive
In the current job market, it’s important to be on your toes when it comes to hiring. Antiquated hiring processes, focusing too much on skills rather than personality, and not checking references and background are ways that many employers make repeated and fatal hiring errors. Reading and staying in the loop on best practices is the best way to avoid making costly mistakes and hiring and retaining the best.
