The True Cost of a Bad Hire and How to Avoid It
Effective leadership is all about the people. Without them, you’d have no one to lead and little chance of scaling your organization. Many of today’s most successful leaders understand this concept and place heavy emphasis on building a solid team. With the right employees behind you, reaching new heights becomes common practice.
Boosted morale, improved efficiency, and the promotion of company growth are just a few of the benefits associated with making the right hire. Remember that old saying “good help is hard to find”? If you’ve got a great employee, we recommend holding on to them as long as possible and for good reason!
Inversely, employing individuals who aren’t a good fit for your organization can do serious damage. If you’ve found yourself in a position where an employee is no longer contributing to success, perhaps even hindering it, you’re not alone. Hiring the right people isn’t a straightforward process. It can be difficult to gauge whether an employee will be a good fit for your organization, which is why many employers today struggle with the process.
Luckily, there are a few actions you can take to minimize the number of ‘bad hires’ moving forward:
1. Post an Accurate Job Description
Well-known hiring boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn are great resources available for you to commence your hiring process. You’ll post your vacancy and begin attracting great candidates, right? In a perfect world, yes! But to get these results, strategic planning and effort will first be required. An unclear and off-base job description will almost certainly draw in the wrong applicants, wasting both your time and that of the candidates.
Set aside the time to plan an effective and realistic job description. Determine the skills and requirements that your ideal candidate would have. You’ll want to include specialized skills, soft skills, and personality traits in your post. It’s not an uncommon practice to research or use similar job postings for reference, but we advise against a full-on copy-paste approach. Each business has individualized qualities and preferences. Not adhering to these specificities (needs, company culture, etc.) can result in a less-than-ideal match.
2. Consider Both Technical Skills and Soft Skills
These days, company culture can make all the difference in an organization’s ability to succeed. Employers work hard to maintain the presence of a company’s mission and values in the workplace. The last thing you’d want is a new hire with opposing views, clashing with set your policies and staff.
Certain roles require very specific skills to perform the expected duties and responsibilities. While technical skills are paramount in the selection process, it doesn’t mean a decision should be made solely on these criteria. Creating a collaborative team requires positivity, communication, and a strong work ethic. By prioritizing these qualities in a candidate’s potential, you’re less likely to waste resources on a bad hire.
3. Adapt Your Interview Process to Weed Out Bad Hires
After reviewing resumes, you’ll then select the top applicants for an interview. Creating an effective and in-depth interviewing process is a sure way to weed out potential mismatches. You can start by asking the right questions. Consider including both skill and cultural fit-related questions. This allows you to better understand your potential hire, avoiding costly mistakes down the road.
The interview process provides employers the perfect opportunity to reveal potential shortcomings that weren’t made clear on their resumes. Try looking for reasons not to hire the candidate. If this proves to be a difficult task, you may have found your next great hire!
4. Seek Out Help from a Trusted Recruitment Partner
For high-level positions (Directors, C-Suite, etc.), or roles that require a specific skill set, you may want to consider seeking help from outside sources. Recruiters specialize in attracting, screening, and presenting employers with only highly qualified candidates. Once a partnership between an employer and a recruitment firm is made, the search process immediately begins.
While yes, this service comes at a cost (a fee in exchange for a hire), it’s worth noting the amount of time and effort your in-house staff would take to complete this task on their own. You can think of recruiters as an extension of your team, there to supercharge your hiring efforts for immediate results. Recruiters take a variety of approaches toward the needs of their clients. Thus, we suggest taking the time to research which model works best for your organization.
The Glades Talent Recruitment Solution
Hiring the wrong employee can be expensive for your business. Thankfully, there are steps employers can take to minimize the number of bad hires they make.
At Glades Talent, we have one priority: procuring the best people for our partners. Our team takes an intimate approach to learning the unique and individual needs of your company and culture. The strategic directors combine their extensive industry knowledge and influential network to optimize the sourcing process, presenting you with only the best and brightest talent.
Are you ready to grow a winning team? Bypass the gamble of making a bad hire and contact Glades Talent today for details on how we can support your urgent human capital needs.
