3 Hiring Mistakes You’re Making Right Now (and How To Fix Them)!
Hiring the right people is a must for every company, however, it is the one area that businesses tend to take for granted.
In my long career in talent acquisition, I’ve seen the hiring function treated as something any business unit can handle — essentially relegating it to a sub-duty for any specialty — be they account executives or general admin staff. In these cases hiring is inevitably treated as an afterthought and a necessary evil.
The first thing to understand is that hiring well is a science, and if it’s not being treated as such the resulting mistakes won’t be of the sort easily fixed by a mere firing.
Here’s a short list of the biggest hiring mistakes I’ve seen my clients make, and some effective fixes that will reverse certain disaster in building a capable, effective workforce.
Mistake #1: Hiring for a Role You Don’t Actually Need
Are balls dropping on projects? Release dates being missed? Clients churning off into oblivion? New projects coming up with no one to lead them? Clearly all of these issues can be addressed by adding additional talent to the team, right? Not always.
Deciding to hire someone new due to a series of mysterious internal failings is a reactive move, and reactivity-based hiring is the literal worst way to go. When costly mistakes shake the foundation of a business unit’s function, either the blame game begins and scapegoats are chosen, fired, and replaced, or, without any true investigation to determine where the breakdowns occurred, it’s assumed that a extra body will solve the problem.
Sometimes, a new search for talent begins because there’s a new business initiative, product, or campaign starting and either leadership doesn’t believe that their existing talent has the chops to own it, or they believe that their current team doesn’t have the bandwidth.
While there are instances where bandwidth, talent, and acumen are the problem and fresh blood could be the right fix, there are other instances where existing talent can fill in the gaps for much less money.
Fix: Audit your teams, then decide if new talent is the answer.
If there is a particular failing that has prompted this new job search, start there and examine who worked on the failed project, understand their contribution to the failure, and determine the root cause of their oversight.
If the employee’s project-ruining mistake is a result of a shortcoming that has been identified previously, for example, in their employee review, make the decision to put them on probation or release them if this is a reoccurring problem. If it’s a rare mess-up, be direct with them about their mistake and have a conversation about how they can improve performance going forward. If they do not improve the behaviors in the agreed-upon time, this is an understandable termination that could require a replacement.
If there’s a new project on the horizon and leadership isn’t confident that the current team member(s) is up to the task, determine why that is, exactly. The only way to do this is to understand, at a granular level, what the skill requirements are for the new project to compare against an actual understanding of the existing team member’s abilities to determine if they could actually rise to the challenge.
Most likely the team member is looking for additional responsibility, and supporting your existing team’s growth by giving them fresh responsibilities is a win-win for both parties. If you find that there’s a real experience gap that will not allow your existing talent to successfully handle the new project, it then makes sense to hire a new team member.
If bandwidth concerns are driving the push to hire new talent, ask applicable team members to audit their time spent and turn this in to you. How many minutes a day are they spending doing A, B, or C? You should have a deep understanding of the optimal time it takes to complete each of their key job responsibilities. If they are taking more or less time to complete these tasks than they should, dig deeper into the reasons for this and have a conversation around efficiency, if needed. If you determine that they are performing their tasks according to the optimal task-time schedule without much time to spare, then adding another headcount to your team is the right answer.
The key here is understanding how your team spends their time, and evaluating any performance issues that, if corrected, will allow your existing talent to take on the workload before spending valuable time and money searching for new talent.
Mistake #2: Purely Conversational Interviewing
This is by far one of the most pervasive mistakes in hiring today. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve debriefed an interviewer after they’ve spoken to a candidate only to learn that the interviewer “liked” the candidate. They may tell me that the candidate “was nice, and easy to talk to” or that “they had a good handshake” and “had good answers for all of the questions.” When I pry to determine exactly why those answers were good, why they liked the candidate, or what specific answers the candidate gave that indicated their fitness for the key outcomes for the role, they don’t have an answer.
They don’t have an answer because they went in and had a chat with the candidate that involved asking general behavioral questions that can’t be linked to actual performance, or they literally talked about the role in general without assessing fitness. This happens often with inexperienced interviewers.
Additionally, purely conversational interviewing is a surefire way to introduce bias into your process and miss the mark on determining the right fit for the role.
Fix: Create interview guides with specific interview questions and answer keys.
Is this prescriptive? Yes. Hiring should be as prescriptive as possible. While I always encouraged my teams to be conversational with the people they interview, it is an interview, after all. The only reason you and the interviewee are speaking is to determine whether they can do the work, not if they are a good conversationalist. It’s important to like the people you work with, but that can be determined while you ask the right questions that indicate future performance of key tasks.
As hiring manager or talent acquisition professional, it is imperative that you arm every interviewer with a list of pertinent interview questions and their acceptable answers. Before interviewing begins for any role, everyone involved in the interview process should meet to familiarize themselves with these questions and the corresponding answer key. This is also a great time to address how to handle any gray areas, and determine what incorrect answers look like.
If this isn’t happening, your interviewers are just chatting and their feedback is based on gut feeling, not measurable performance indicators.
Mistake #3: Interviewing Without an Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP).
In my article on diversity hiring, I discuss the importance of the Ideal Candidate Profile in determining the best fit for your role. Hiring without one is a completely inefficient process, and a widespread practice, unfortunately.
Many times, hiring managers/leadership will build a job description and think that it is one and the same as the Ideal Candidate Profile, and in a general sense, it is. However, if you think about the function of a job description, you’ll see that it is a list of duties that often have no ties to outcomes, and a list of desired skills that are often based in a dream world.
What’s more, many interviewers don’t take the time to gain a deep understanding of the job description either, so they not only lack an ICP, they also have only a vague understanding of what the right candidate looks like and are basing their assessment on their collaboration with whomever is doing the work now, or did it in the past.
Fix: Build the ICP before all else.
Your ICP is your iron-clad guidebook. It determines the needs and outcomes for the role you’re looking to hire for. The ICP is built through the hiring team’s candid conversation about the key outcomes for the role.
The key information needed to draft the ICP is: a comprehensive list of duties for the role, what success/outcomes look like (explicitly) and how the role impacts the business, either on a macro or micro level depending on the role. If the hiring team cannot come up with this information, it might not quite be time to hire.
From there, simply take the time to complete an ICP that incorporates all of the things that the hiring team agreed upon. Assess the skills needed to achieve those goals and outcomes, and add those to the ICP.
Next, determine an average experience level based on the actual deliverables the role has. This act will eliminate the risk of hiring someone that overshoots your needs our someone who doesn’t quite meet the bar.
The hiring team must use this ICP as a tool for building out the interview guides (with questions and answer key) that interviewers should use to identify the right person for the job.
ICPs ensure that there is an actual standard against which to hire talent. Without one, you’re essentially hiring based on gut feeling and that’s when bias and bad hires can enter the fray and cripple your company’s overall success.
Hiring is a delicate practice that requires a tactical approach to be effective. If you’re making any of the mistakes above, know that you’re not the only one and devote time to fixing them. You’ll be way ahead in the hiring game — and success will follow.
