Imagine this scenario:
You’ve just spent weeks posting your job, screening resumes, interviewing, negotiating, and preparing to bring your new hire on board.
Then, your shiny new employee shows up for work…and just doesn’t cut it.
Maybe they’re habitually late. Maybe they just don’t get it. Maybe they want to do things “their” way and not the way that’s right for your business…
Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that you realize you’ve made a hiring mistake.
And now, the worst part begins: not only do you NOT get the additional productivity you were hoping for, but you have to begin the process all over again, feeling hesitant and even less enthusiastic about hiring because you’ve just been badly burned.
Too many business owners can relate to this scenario. But fortunately, there are some specific reasons why bad hires happen — AND some proven ways to avoid them.
Hiring Mistake #1: Hiring in a Hurry
I know, I know…you needed someone yesterday. But it’s no excuse to rush things, since you may find yourself having to start all over again.
Many small businesses lack defined procedures for hiring and recruitment, which makes it easy to take convenient shortcuts, like hiring based solely on a recommendation, or hiring the first person you interview, or failing to define the job properly…
Why are these shortcuts a problem? Without a clear hiring process, it’s extremely easy to pick someone who doesn’t fit the job. They may lack critical skills, have the wrong personality, a poor work ethic, or other problems.
Hiring is already an uncertain process. By trying to hire fast at the expense of hiring well, you only increase the odds of making a mistake.
Solution: Have a Clear, Efficient, and Legal Process
It may take longer, but it’s essential to establish a well-defined hiring process for your business.
An online hiring tool makes it easier to do this because of the built-in structure it provides, but there’s no need for technology in order to have a clear process.
Here’s a simplified version of the process we often use for hiring here at ClearFit:
- Define the job: Brainstorm about job requirements, required skills, qualifications, and responsibilities, involving all key stakeholders. (When using the ClearFit hiring tool, we’d also choose a Success Profile at this stage.)
- Find candidates: Post the job to job boards, invite candidates you know, ask for referrals, share the job via social media, attend networking events…
- Select candidates for interviews: Using relevant criteria, screen your candidates to select the ones you want to interview. For example, you should quickly weed out the segment of applicants who just don’t meet your experience requirements. Here at ClearFit, we also screen applicants based on their personality, which is a very powerful way of focusing in on the people who have what it takes to succeed in the job.
- Initial phone interviews: Start with a ten minute phone interview with every candidate you’re interested in. This saves lots of time, as you can often easily recognize which candidates are worth talking to in more depth based on a short call.
- In-person interviews: Have in-person interviews with your top candidates. It’s a good idea to have more than one interview with each candidate and to involve multiple people from within the organization, so that you can get a diversity of perspectives. Come prepared with a consistent set of questions that focus on the skills, experience, and behaviours that are critical to the job.
- Check references: Once you’ve selected the best candidate, carefully check references.
- Make the offer: If the references check out, it’s time to make an offer. It’ s best to submit a formal offer letter that contains all the details, typically including compensation, hours of work, and other important points. There can be a variety of legal requirements for making an employment offer that vary depending on your location, so make sure you do your own due diligence to ensure your offer letter is legally sound.
Whatever process you use, follow it consistently for ALL candidates to help ensure a fair and objective result.
Hiring Mistake #2: Looking for a Unicorn
When planning for a new hire, it’s easy to become like a kid in a candy store…we want it all!
You begin to write your job description, and you find yourself upping the ante: increasing the years of experience, adding education requirements, piling on additional skills…
This is always fun, but it leads to a problem: you can end up searching for someone who doesn’t actually exist (or someone extremely hard to find).
This is what we call the unicorn.
If you’re looking for a unicorn, your search is bound to end up in disappointment. You either won’t find qualified people or you’ll end up paying through the nose for someone who’s one-in-a-million, when this may not be truly necessary.
Solution: Be Realistic about What You NEED
Once you do your initial brainstorm to define your job and ideal candidate, look back over the list with a critical eye. This works best when you can collaborate with other team members but can easily be done by yourself.
Questions to ask include:
- Is a particular skill/qualification/requirement a must have? Is it important? Is it merely nice to have? Do you really need it at all? Focus your job description around the most critical qualifications, and don’t limit your candidate pool unnecessarily by including “luxury items” that aren’t really necessary for the role.
- Does your job description ask for skills that aren’t typically connected? For example, you may have trouble finding an administrator that also knows how to manage your IT infrastructure or a salesperson that can also do your bookkeeping. It can seem like a smart move to combine multiple jobs into one role, especially within a small team. But if the role is stretched in all directions, you won’t easily find someone who can succeed in it.
- Does the level of skill and experience you’re looking for match what you’re prepared to pay? You may need to adjust either the seniority or pay grade of the position in order to find qualified candidates that you can actually afford.
Hiring Mistake #3: Over-Emphasizing Experience
Years of experience are inherently comforting. What better guarantee of success could you ask for? After all, they’ve done it before.
The truth may surprise you.
Experience is important. But taken in isolation, it is NOT the strongest predictor of job success.
There’s lots of examples of people who were very experienced and accomplished but who crashed and burned when faced with the demands of a new role.
A few things to keep in mind about the value of experience:
- Someone with ten years of experience may just have ten years of experience doing a mediocre job.
- Just because someone has experience and achievements in one role does not mean they are equipped for success when doing something else, even if the roles are similar.
- Someone with experience knows how to do what they’ve already done. But do they know how to do something new? What happens when they face a problem they haven’t encountered before? You may be better off with someone less experienced and better at problem solving.
- People with extensive experience generally cost more and expect more autonomy and influence within the organization. This may be just what you’re looking for, but it’s an important reality to keep in mind.
Solution: Take a Balanced Approach
It would be fool-hardy to suggest that experience is meaningless — it’s not.
But it’s important to look at ALL the factors that actually predict success.
Here are some other areas that are crucial to explore:
- How do they work with others? — Are they team-oriented or do they prefer working alone? How considerate are they? How well do they influence others? Are these traits important to the role?
- How do they manage themselves? — Can they recover from setbacks? How do they deal with stress? Are they open to change?
- How do they manage work? — Are they organized? How do they tackle problems? Are they good at coming up with innovative solutions?
- What MOTIVATES them at work? — Are they more interested in people or data? How much tolerance do they have for risk?
These traits are hard to spot on a resume but are actually MORE important than experience in predicting job success.
Identify the personality traits that are important to the role and then evaluate them during the hiring process. This will give you a better picture of whether the candidate truly has what it takes.
It’s only fair to add that there are serious limitations to how well you can gauge these traits during an interview. To really understand if someone has the personality and motivation traits to succeed in a job, your best bet is to use an objective hiring tool like the one built in to ClearFit’s Success Prediction Process.
Hiring Mistake #4: Being Dazzled by the Interview
Many small business owners “trust their gut” when it comes to interviewing. Because they know their business, they may assume they also know how to pick out the candidates who will succeed.
While this can be true, interviews also hold many traps and pitfalls for the unwary, such as the well-known halo effect, where judgement is influenced by factors such as likeability or attractiveness.
Don Moore, associate professor at the Haas School of Business, sums up the problem elegantly:
“Interviews favor candidates who are attractive, sociable, articulate, and tall. They also favor manipulative candidates, or ones who know how to make a positive impression even in a brief interview. But those aren’t always the best job performers…It can be difficult for an interviewer to see past attractiveness and flattery to predict how a person will actually perform once hired.”
— “Stop Being Deceived by Interviews When You’re Hiring”
If you aren’t prepared going into an interview, it can be very easy to make these mistakes. And when your tall, articulate, attractive new hire turns out to be a bust, you’ll wonder what went wrong.
Solution: Interview with a Plan
You can help ensure interviews are as fair and objective as possible by building a solid plan before you meet your first candidate.
Here are a few strategies to follow:
- Prepare interview questions based on the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. This prep work will save time and ensure you explore the areas of greatest interest.
- Use behavioural or scenario-based interview questions to go beyond the typical canned responses that many candidates prepare before-hand. For example:“In your experience, what kinds of work rules are helpful and not helpful? Provide an example of each.”“How do you deal with angry or negative customers or co-workers?”“Tell me about ways you have tried to develop your work skills or qualifications.”
- Keep these questions open ended — let the candidate do most of the talking.
- Push candidates to be specific. Don’t be satisified with general statements like, “I increased sales.” Ask, “by how much?” or “What did you do to achieve this?”
- Use a consistent scoring system during interviews, where you evaluate each response for each candidate. This makes it much easier to look back and evaluate the interview objectively, instead of relying on less focused impressions.
Final Thoughts
For many small and medium-sized businesses, hiring mistakes are not only costly but simply unaffordable.
Following these tips doesn’t ensure you’ll never make a hiring mistake, but it will ensure you’re much less likely to do so.
If you want to increase your chances of hiring success even more, try a free 30 day trial of ClearFit.
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