Three Ways to Avoid Making a Bad Hire

Astonishingly, up to 95 percent of companies admit to making a bad hire every year and nearly a third of them seemed oblivious to the actual costs of making a bad hiring decision.

Obviously, there are many factors that have to go into a cost calculation of hiring the wrong person for the role. Of course there are calculations of the costs of advertising, recruiting and the entire interview process that can give a concrete start to understanding the bigger cost picture. But that is not the complete cost. There are also the costs of the onboarding process, the training time and decreased productivity while the bad hire gets up to speed, impact of that person on staff morale and, depending on their role, potential impact on customer relations.

So making a bad hire is a much more costly mistake than may have been realized. Now the question becomes what to do to avoid it? And fortunately, here there are some clear things to help.

1 | COVER YOUR BASES EARLY ON

First, don’t wait to do professional assessments until during the onboarding phase. Find out all you can about a candidate before you decide to bring them on board in the first place.

2 | GO BEYOND THE RESUME

Second, don’t just consider the applicant’s qualifications on paper. Try to get a whole picture of who the applicant is as a person, whether they will be a good match for the culture you are recruiting for and how they like to work. A great way to do this is with on-demand video interviews, which enable recruiters to assess candidate communication skills, read their body language and gain insight to candidate personality to get a sense of what kind of team member they would be.

3 | ASK MORE THAN JUST BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Third, ask questions that force the candidate to reveal some insights about them. While of course you want to respect their privacy and not infringe on their personal lives, there are some great questions to include in a digital interview that may be revealing. Make sure your interviews ask the candidates how they see themselves fitting into an organization and what their goals are, ask them what made them interested in the job they applied for and ask them what they are hoping to learn in their new role. The answers to these questions and others like them, combined with their body language and other nonverbal clues may help you help your companies avoid bad hires.

About The Author

Esteban Gomez is a marketing consultant with interviewstream. He loves learning and has a passion for traveling, having visited many countries including China, Colombia, Italy, and Peru.