Even your best, most skilled HR person has had a bad hire at one time or another. Perhaps the candidate hid their foibles during the interview process or it took a few months for their true colors to show, but either way, a bad hire is part of just about every HR reps past. While there’s no hiding the fact that these mistakes are costly – from both a time and financial standpoint – making a bad hire also represents a unique opportunity to reevaluate your hiring process, tweak your candidate requirements, and ultimately seek to avoid making the same mistake again.
Below, we outline five areas you may want to analyze for potential improvement if you’ve got a bad hire on your books.
Re-define your job description
You can’t hire a bad person if they aren’t passed along to you as a result of your job description. Perhaps your job description was too specific and pigeonholed you into such a position that only one or two candidates that you perceived to be qualified applied for the job – neither of which were right for the position or the company in general. Perhaps your job description was too broad and it flung open the door to just about anyone with a heartbeat (and the desire for a new job!) Maybe your job description hit the right note, but you failed to convey the true values of your company or the culture that you have built such that your new hire could never truly “fit in.” Either way, if you’ve had a bad hire in your not-so-distant past, your company could benefit from going through that job description with a fine-toothed comb and really making sure it’s hitting the right note.
Consider your line up
At a minimum, we recommend that a candidate meet with HR to assess their general fit for the company and the job at hand. Then meet with a team leader or a potential manager to really gauge their aptitude for the actual job, and potentially even meet with the CEO to really determine their fit for the company. As for who weighs in on the current decision, should it only be those who have met your candidate or does it pay to include other decision makers, such as your big picture people, like your financial planner or any others involved in the future direction of the company? If you’ve missed the mark, it might make sense to broaden or lock-down your circle accordingly so that future decisions can be better informed.
Back to basics
In a recent survey, employers noted that one of the key issues with their bad hire was that they assumed that they would ramp up to the role more quickly than they ultimately did. Sure, sometimes an employee really does fall short of expectations, but in the interests of being completely honest with yourselves, you also need to question whether you, as a company, fell short on providing the training, skills or even equipment necessary in order for said worker to succeed. If there is a skills gap identified, maybe it’s time to shore up that area of the onboarding process or make other changes to your orientation program in order to truly set your employee up for success.
Add to your toolbox
Sure, your judgement can go a long way when it comes to picking the perfect candidate, but wouldn’t it be nice to get validation to prove that you’re picking the right person for the job? As a company, you should lean into pre-employment assessments, an outside tool which can identify the skills, characteristics, and aptitude of the candidate you are considering. Further, this tool can be tweaked along the way – based on the candidates you hired that hit it out of the park and those that fell far short – and can serve as just another instrument that can help guide and inform your process and maybe give you a bit more confidence that you are making the best decision.
End with an exit interview
When you have a bad hire, it isn’t typically just the company that is in an unhappy situation. However, this again presents a significant opportunity to learn from your mistake. Rather than dismiss this worker, hold an exit interview with your bad hire and ask them questions about what they enjoyed about the company, what they struggled with, what they wish they had known going in, and even what they learned from their experience. Then take the feedback from this worker and use it to inform your future hiring practices to prevent a repeat mistake.
