Avoid The #1 Hiring Mistake

In the last six months, have you heard this comment about a new hire who is already gone?  “They interviewed so well I don’t know why they couldn’t perform?”  And now the organization gets to drop another $50,000 to fill a position for the second time in six months.  That is the process when people make the biggest hiring mistake.  They hire who they like.  Even an entire interview team can get fooled into making bad hires and the costs to the organization are staggering.

To avoid the pitfall of hiring who is best liked, add science to the hiring process that will reveal “under the hood” how a person is naturally wired to make better decisions on how a candidate will fit the job, the team, the relationship with other people.  This will change the measure from “who is liked” to “what does that mean”.  This is only accomplished with a normative assessment.  The information gained is critical to predicting job success that can’t be gained otherwise.  Saving the organization from the cost of a single bad hire is more than the cost of a lifetime of assessments.  What does it mean when a person doesn’t follow rules.  What does it mean when people can’t multi task.  What does it mean when a person makes quick emotional decisions.  What does it mean.

Take the situation Jared just shared.  He is one of five a VP’s of Sales in a mid-sized organization.  The process they follow is to advertise, review resumes, and narrow the field down to the best candidates (based on who is liked).  The short list candidates then go to the SVP and from there on to the President of the organization.  Jared shared that everybody liked this one candidate for a sales role but after nine months, there were no sales.  Why?  Because they all based their decisions on who they best liked, and this approach is systematically flawed.  Flawed because people need jobs and they get very good at hiding undesirable behaviors that get them unliked.  You need to know what those undesirable behaviors are.

Take for example the behavior of assertiveness.  Candidates never say in an interview “I tend to avoid conflict” because they won’t get hired and it is easy to be assertive in an interview because really, there is no leadership level conflict.  The subject is in a hypothetical state.  Then the conflict avoidant person is hired and within weeks that conflict avoidant behavior shows up.  Departments begin to run themselves, relationships break, trust falls apart, performance is crumbling and nobody saw it coming.  A good normative assessment with offer insights not normally investigated.  That will influence the direction and effective of the interview which inturn allows for better hiring decisions.