Top 5 Hiring Mistakes: Avoid these to build a better team.
August 16th, 2010Smart hiring is crucial to your company’s success and making the wrong benchmarking choices can be costly – wasting time and money, and potentially harming culture and morale. To help you prepare for your next hiring decision we put together this list of top 5 common mistakes to avoid:
1) Assuming you’ve already got the best people.
Companies frequently select new employees by benchmarking the characteristics of current employees. While defining behaviors, skills and motivators that are characteristic of top performers can be useful, it assumes that YOUR top performers are the best available. Benchmarking against top performers in your industry can set the bar higher and help you identify key hiring attributes for a more effective team.
2) Past performance bias.
The business climate never stands still: new approaches, new technologies, economic changes, global shifts all impact the competitive marketplace. Just because something worked well before, doesn’t mean that it will necessarily continue to work when the climate changes. Benchmarking against past top performers may bias you towards skills that have become outdated or behaviors and motivators that aren’t well-suited to the current landscape.
3) Not having well-defined guidelines.
This can be subtle. Let’s say you need to hire to grow a new division. You might benchmark against an employee who has been great at maintaining high levels of quality – very systems and process oriented – so you hire someone similarly detail-driven who values rules and structure. Unfortunately, what you needed was also someone who thrived on making order out of chaos, which wasn’t one of the benchmarked employee’s characteristics. There is often a big difference between being good at building effective structure and being good at operating effectively within an already defined structure.
4) Too much like you.
This relates to the previous mistake. We all like looking in the mirror, but hiring someone just like ourselves might be a mistake. If we are not objective about what’s truly needed to build an effective team we may overload our staff with “mini-me” clones that appeal to us during the interview process, but throw group performance out of balance.
5) Identifying only what you want, not what you don’t want.
When gathering your benchmarks in preparation for a new hire you may notice that all of your top performers share some attributes. Maybe you’ve given them all DISC assessments and you recognize some overlapping behaviors, or they’ve got areas of overlap that can be measured by their Workplace Motivators results. Well before you rush to write the job description based on these findings ask yourself, “Did my bottom performers share any behaviors or motivators with my top performers?” Separating the desirable traits from the coincidental traits can make a huge impact in the success of your hiring process. Every commonality surfaced by your benchmarking should be compared against top and bottom performers to identify the ones which are unique to the top performers. Likewise, if you benchmark the bottom you may also identify undesirable traits, motivators or job-specific behaviors, which you wouldn’t have know to filter for if you only benchmarked the upper echelon of your team.
Taking the time to prepare for and avoid these mistakes is not as difficult as you might think. Assessments that take as little as 15 – 20 minutes to administer can save you thousands of dollars and untold time by identifying the data needed for more effective benchmarking, and more accurate application of those benchmarks to your hiring decisions.
