Hire Hard To Manage Easy

Ask yourself this question:  If you fired everyone on your payroll today, what percentage would you hire back tomorrow?If your answer is less than 90%, then it’s time to overhaul your hiring process.In our work with a wide range of clients, we find that one critical factor impacts both the ability and the pace of business growth – the extent to which the business can get and keep enough of the right people.

Relying on traditional interviewing techniques alone is flawed for many reasons, the most common being:

The check-in left such a bad taste in my mouth that, although we ended up having a good time, the first impression was indelible.

It occurred to me that companies can make a similar mistake with new staff through a sloppy on-boarding process.

• The interviewer suffers “the halo effect” where they’re overly impressed by one or more personal characteristics and therefore assume that everything else must be perfect;
• Depending on their personality, sometimes interviewers are looking for a reason to reject a candidate. I’ve seen negative responses given twice the weighting of positive ones, and candidates rejected after a single error, despite multiple positive responses;
• I’ve experienced interviewers fall into the “recency trap”, where as a result of a few bad interviews in a row, the next person who performs satisfactorily has been inaccurately rated as outstanding. The reverse is also true.
• Often candidates who “are just like me” (the interviewer) are automatically given higher ratings even though the job may not require someone “just like them”.

According to a recent HBR article, 80% of employee turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions – that’s an extraordinary statistic given the financial cost of selecting the wrong person, not to mention the negative impact on business productivity and team morale.

We encourage our clients to broaden their thinking to include personality testing. Personality testing is an extremely valuable tool to help you take the guess work out of hiring.

The reputation of personality testing has been a bit tarnished due to a surplus of instruments on the market that are not backed by any evidence or research. Don’t be discouraged, there are some terrific testing instruments available and our preferred one is Harrison Assessments.