There isn’t really a class you can take which will allow you to learn the best practices for hiring individuals needed by your company. The process has never really been reduced to a science, and even those managers in a position of having to hire new employees regularly never learned a formal method for going about it.
For the most part, hiring new employees involves winging it, trusting one’s instincts about a person, and executing some skillful questioning that can help determine a candidate’s suitability for a position. It might seem odd that this is the case, given the fact that so much depends on hiring the right individuals for the right positions in a company.
With the shortage of highly skilled individuals in the general talent pool today, there’s an even greater emphasis on hiring the right individuals to fill open positions. That puts a lot of pressure on a hiring manager to get it right, and sometimes it doesn’t work out quite right.
Consequences of Bad Hiring
What happens when you make the wrong choice and hire the wrong individual for a job? You don’t generally find out that it’s the wrong choice immediately, but over a period of time, it becomes pretty apparent to most people in the workplace that the wrong person was hired for a job.
For instance, a newly hired employee who continues to perform poorly even after adequate training and orientation often requires between 10 and 20 hours per week of supervision and additional guidance from managers or proficient employees. This takes skilled employees away from their jobs, and reduces the effectiveness of the overall workforce, while one specific employee is being brought up to snuff.
A survey conducted by Robert Half Company concluded that money lost on bad hires was not the worst consequence of a poor hiring decision and that other factors affected accompany even more negatively. In the survey, 39% of CFO’s considered the single worst impact of a bad hire to be that it lowered overall staff morale significantly. Another 34% of CFO’s considered lost productivity to be the most damaging consequence of making a bad hire. Surprisingly, only about 25% of those polled thought monetary losses constituted the worst single impact of having made a poor hiring decision.
Why are so Many Poor Decisions Made?
As stated above, there is no formalized process for choosing the right employee during a hiring process. If there were, all submitted applications would simply be processed by some kind of software application, and the perfect choice would always be made, with both company and employee ecstatic about the results.
However, the process remains highly informal and subjective, and the truth is that many hiring managers continue to underestimate the full enormity of making the best choices for new hires. While this may be understandable for newer managers who are unfamiliar with the hiring process, it can be almost unforgivable for a more experienced manager, who has been through it many times before.
In the end, even the best hiring managers will sometimes make mistakes and select the wrong person for the job. The best hedge against bad choices is to be as thorough as possible in evaluating all application documentation, and in thoroughly evaluating an individual during an interview from all those standpoints most important to a company.
How Recruiters can Help
Recruiters can add a great deal of value to the hiring process, first of all by taking some of the pressure off of hiring managers, to find the right kind of talent for the job opening. Recruiters are professionals who make this kind of work their living, which means if there’s anyone who is highly familiar with the whole hiring process and the talent selection process, these are the people for it.
Recruiting agencies can find talent from a much wider geographic area than a company might be able to find on its own resources, and that can go a long way toward overcoming the inadequacy of any localized talent pool. Another very valuable contribution of recruiting agencies is in the speed at which they can generate a list of potential candidates. Anyone involved in business knows that time is money, and the longer any job position is open, the more revenue is being lost by the company seeking new talent.
Because of the number of resources that a recruiter would have access to, a great many more candidates can be contacted in a short period of time, to expedite the hiring process for a company. Despite the fact that there is no real school to learn all the ins and outs of hiring from, it can be extremely advantageous to ally yourself with a very skilled and productive recruiting agency that can produce a number of qualified candidates.
For hiring managers, this should mean that much of the most difficult part of the total hiring process is handled by a reputable agency which is very effective at providing talented candidates. With some of the heavy work already accomplished, it remains for the hiring manager to sharpen his/her skills at evaluating character and choosing that candidate most suited to the profile sought by the company.