The 10 Most Common
Hiring Mistakes
(And How To Avoid Them)
Aggressively minimizing products liability risk
can save your business thousands of dollars.
by Don Blohowiak
Even if you only hire one person every couple of years in your
material handling business, each hiring decision is crucial. In fact, if you think about it,
the fewer people you have in your business, the more important each one
is.
As both the author of a book on hiring and a management consultant who
works with many different organizations, I am pained by the common—and
easily avoidable—mistakes that even very wise and experienced business
people so often make when hiring.
Since a bad hiring decision can have terrible effects on your business's
productivity, its success and even the health of its executives (you!),
let's take a look at the traps you need to avoid when hiring those
vitally important members of your staff.
1. Not fully understanding the job to be done. Before you even
announce an opening, have several people review the job through two
lenses: First, define the most critical results the job exists to produce;
and second, identify the personality characteristics that a successful
person doing the job should have (e.g., patience or drive, preference to
work constantly with other people or in isolation, etc.)
2. Seeking “chemistry” with a potential new hire. Getting a
good feeling from a job
candidate usually means that he or she reminds you of you. Your personal
work style may not be the most appropriate for the job. Hire the kind of
person best suited to the work, not the one you like best.
3. Giving too much weight to prior experience. Most people,
studies consistently show, are in jobs for which they really aren't well
suited and really don't like. If you hire someone based on their having
done the same or a similar job before, you're just repeating the error
and will end up with a less than fully productive person. Hire people who want to do the job you have open.
4. Using psychological tests incorrectly. Good tests—when used
only for their intended purposes—can give you tremendously helpful
insights into a candidate. But many hiring managers use poorly designed
tests that are not validated, or they use valid tests for the wrong
purposes. Either way, you get bad or misleading data that can steer you in
exactly the wrong direction, leading you to reject a candidate who might
be very well suited to the job, or hiring a candidate who is not.
5. Preparing poorly for interviews. For decades we've known
that most employment interviews are nearly worthless indicators of a new
hire's future job performance. But virtually everyone still uses them.
Used correctly, a structured job interview—where you list
questions that specifically target job skills or personality
characteristics that you are seeking can be very effective in making a
good match. The key is to know what you are looking for and to ask all
interviewees the same core questions.
6. Talking too much during the interview. Resist the temptation
that most managers fall prey to: trying to sell the applicant on the idea
of working for your business and taking the job for what you can afford to
pay. Instead, ask questions. Then listen. Later, offer to answer questions
and explain more about the opportunity at your business, but first know
whether you are seriously interested in the candidate. Otherwise, don't
waste your time selling somebody on a job you don't want to offer them.
7. Taking inadequate notes during interviews. If you interview
more than one person for a job, inevitably those candidates all start to
blur. Take detailed notes during your interviews. Try to record a
candidate's exact words as much as possible. This is not as hard as it
might seem if you are working with a structured interview as recommended
above.
8. Mistaking candidate claims for reality. Most job seekers are
much better at the interview game than the hiring manager. They may have
been coached, rehearsed, videotaped and counseled on how to give perfect
answers in an interview. Don't ask for a candidate's general opinions
or philosophies about a job. Ask specific questions that reveal a person's
exact work experience. The more specific details you get about actual work
experiences, the better you'll be able to project what a person will do
in your operation. Remember: hypothetical questions yield hypothetical
answers—fiction.
9. Making the hiring decision alone. Have several people at
various levels and in different functional areas interview your final
candidates. Consider having top managers interview your finalists by
phone. They may well see things you didn't. The more perspectives you
have for a candidate, the more informed your ultimate hiring decision will
be.
10. Setting false expectations for the job or your business. The
number one reason new hires don't work out is that they say they were
led to believe the new job or company was something that it turned out not
to be. Before hiring anyone, invite them to spend at least a day (pay them
as an independent contractor if you need to) in the space where they'd
actually be working. Seeing the real environment where the job is to be
done removes all mystery about the work and helps the candidate to have a
clear idea of what he or she is about to undertake. That way, they can
start the material handling job with a full commitment to making it a success and vastly
increase the likelihood that they'll make the long-term contribution you're
hoping they will. |
