Making the right hiring decisions has proven to be a challenge for many organizations. According to a recent survey study, nearly three-quarters of employers are affected by bad hiring. To make matters worse, about two-thirds of candidates accepted a job only to realize it wasn't a good fit - and half of them quit within six months. The cost of these poor employees can add up quickly. According to Harvard Business School, bad hiring costs can be as high as 3-5 times an employee's annual salary. For an employee earning $50,000 a year, a single hiring mistake can cost as much as $250,000. Just making a few mistakes can easily cost a company millions, putting enormous pressure on managers to make better decisions. Fortunately, there are many strategies that can help companies make more objective hiring decisions.
Here are some tips organizations should keep in mind when evaluating candidates: 1: Don't "do whatever you want" Many hiring managers fall victim to "first impression bias," which means they decide whether to hire a candidate within the first five minutes of an interview. This gut-based decision-making process has little evidence to support its effectiveness. In most cases, it only gives a superficial view of the candidate, usually based on style rather than substance. The industry mailing list to move away from hard data and systematic recruiting methods in favor of more gut-based responses is surprisingly common. Research on recruiting practices shows that hiring for "likeability" is one of the leading causes of hiring mistakes. While there is something to be said for candidates who make a good first impression, the selection process is more likely to be successful when it provides measurable data and assesses overall impressions and sentiments that may not be relevant to the position. 2:
A systematic interview process Interviews are a great opportunity to assess a candidate's soft skills, but in many cases the interviewer uses an inefficient process that yields little useful information. One such method is the unstructured interview, which is a very loosely organized conversation with no predetermined plan. Interviewers immediately identify their questions and interview strategy, which means not every candidate will be scrutinized the same way. Additionally, questions may not be based on job-related competencies or outcomes. These types of interviews are erratic and often ineffective—just a coin toss can yield equally good hiring results. At the other extreme are highly structured interviews, which are thorough but very rigid and inflexible. Interviewers ask candidates a series of predetermined questions in a specific order, which can make the process too restrictive to generate meaningful insights. In some cases, the same information can be collected by reviewing resumes or written questionnaires.