Hiring on Impulse: A Very Common Case for Hiring Managers and Business Owners
You need help at your workplace, and you need it now. But you don’t have the time to sort through an endless stack of resumes, so you base your hiring strictly on impulse. Not necessarily focusing on the candidates’ particular behavioral traits and past experiences, you concentrate more on the now.
Unfortunately, this simple mistake can — and will — drastically affect the future success of your business.
We’ve all experienced this type of predicament. Your business is successful and growing at a faster pace than expected. From a business perspective, this is not a bad thing!
However, when it comes to properly staffing and setting yourself up for success, throwing in extra random bodies for the sake of expanding your team is never the right answer, and always a bad business decision.
Too often we ignore our better instincts and the voice in our head that speaks logically. We instead go with our impulses and feelings to just get it over with and hire on a whim.
Let’s be honest. We don’t always have the extra time in our day to sort through piles of resumes and determine who meets the qualifications. If there’s an easy way out, we naturally feel drawn to follow it.
Not necessarily focusing on candidates’ particular behavioral traits and past experiences, you concentrate more on the now.
Are they available now? Do they seem intelligent? Do they look the part?
This crucial mistake is known as “shotgun hiring,” and in the business world, it happens far more than it should.
This behavior is a key ingredient for tarnishing your turnover and ruining retention. All too often, the candidate hired will not fit the job, leaving them to either quit or be fired.
But it doesn’t end there.
Your current customers that have suffered from poor service and bad experiences have now been personally affected. Your training dollars have been spent, turnover increased, and bottom line has been damaged. The list goes on and on…
And it can all be traced back to the fact that you simply hired the wrong person, at the wrong time.
Here are three useful tips to keep in your back pocket when faced with a hiring crisis:
1. Establish deal breakers
What are must-haves? If you find a person who is a good fit for a job, most skills can be learned. You won’t know if a person with ten years experience is any better than one with five until they start doing the job, so be careful to judge job candidates based on these criteria.
2. Use hiring tools
You don’t need a laundry list of past work experiences. You want to know what kind of behaviors, motivations, and core values they possess. Have them fill out an assessment to determine their work ethic and human interest. Also, have more than one employee at your company interview the candidates to provide their perspectives. That way you acquire other opinions/perspectives, as well as support within the organization if you do hire the person.
3. Check references yourself
You’ll discover a lot doing reference checks. It’s important that you not only ask for references, but also, specify who you want to speak with — before they offer — or you’ll simply be provided with a list of their friends. Not knowing who you’re hiring onto a team can easily make or break the future of your business.
Remember, the time you take now to assess and filter through your candidates will be the time you save in the future when you’ve come full circle and find yourself back in the same spot, looking for new qualified employees.
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