Here are the Top 10 ways to guarantee that you hire exactly the wrong person:
- You don’t have a clear picture of exactly which mental and physical capacities, attitudes, personality traits, and skills you need to hire.
- Instead of gleaning information from the candidate first, you tell the candidate all about the job and the kind of person you are looking for.
- You only recruit from the pool of people who are looking for a job rather than from your best prospects – the gainfully employed who may be interested in a new and/or better job opportunity.
- Your best people are too busy working on “more important” things, so they don’t get involved in the selection process.
- You make it too difficult and time-consuming for busy, working people to get into your hiring system.
- You use the same interview questions that everyone else does and every applicant gives you all the standard canned answers.
- Your interviewers do most of the talking when they really should be doing most of the listening.
- You don’t recognize that every step in the hiring process is a pass/fail screening test, and that you need to look at every single step as a test.
- If your hiring system screens applicants out for the lack of education and/or experience, it’s probably screening out some of your best applicants. What you need is a system that screens in talent and the right attitudes.
- You don’t realize how important it is to make sure you only hire STAR employees.
This originally appeared in Humetrics November 2015 Hiring Hints newsletter.