“A good manager… isn’t worried about his own career but rather the careers of those who work for him.” — H. S. M Burns
Everybody who has ever hired anybody will tell you that hiring is hard, and the hiring data agrees. 46% of newly hired employees will fail within their first 18 months according to Leadership IQ’s study of over 20,000 new hires and 1,400 HR executives, while only 19% of new hires are considered top performers over that same time period.
The Society of Human Resource Managers’ study found that poor hiring causes a 41% decrease in department productivity, employee morale falls by 36%, and it has a 22% negative impact on client engagement.
Yet, any web search on hiring mistakes will parade out thousands of responses that explain hiring failures. So if the problem is so prevalent, and the answers so readily available, we have to ask; why are businesses still so bad at hiring?
There are two reasons:
First, the vast majority of the literature on hiring failure is scandalously shallow and appears more interested in generating clicks or likes than providing anything helpful for creating actual solutions.
Second, the roots of hiring hardships lie equally with the hiring process as it does with hiring behavior. If we leave the behaviors of the hiring managers unaccounted for, then we cannot hire with greater confidence and success.
After 20-plus years in recruiting, with responsibility for tens of thousands of hires at organizations generating billions of dollars in sustainable revenue, I have found that these are the biggest, most common hiring mistakes:
- A Disconnect Between the Ideal Candidate and the Actual Job
Typically, what hiring managers think they want, or need, in a person for a job is materially different from what is required. This is manifested by describing a notion of someone who is – or will be – successful in the position based on what they’re ‘like’ and not what they ‘do.’
This is the source of the disconnect, and it results in a cascade of failed hires.
A typical (and laughable!) example of this is infamously known as ‘The Cleveland Airport Test.’ Hiring managers who imagine what a successful hire will be ‘like,’ are imagining someone who will not only be successful in the role, but also as someone they would like – someone they could easily spend three hours waiting for a connecting flight in Cleveland with. The trouble here is obvious – the person you are hiring for the job’s success is not dependent on how well they wait for flights with you in Rust Belt airports.
Instead, hiring managers must focus on what a successful hire will need to do. What will they need to accomplish in the first 30, 60, 90 days and beyond for them to meet all of your expectations? What actions will they take?
The disconnect exists between saying what you want to see in a candidate, as opposed to what the candidate needs to actually do.
- Lack of Hiring Training
Most people who hire aren’t trained to hire – they are trained to do something else. To be an effective manager in almost any industry, one needs to do three things well:
- manage people and projects,
- train team members, and
- hire.
If one doesn’t hire well, they are failing in a significant portion of their job.
The difficulty is that hiring, without comprehensive training, is unlike anything else a manager does at work. Almost every other task a manager performs has a deliverable that is achieved with a thorough plan. A, B, and C must be accomplished along the way to deliverable Z.
Hiring without training or a plan is left to emotion. Candidates are hired based on the feelings of a hiring manager, but fired based on facts. Employees, too, accept jobs based on their emotions and quit based on facts. Hiring training eliminates an over-reliance on emotion in hiring situations, and instead relies on the facts.
- Job Descriptions Designed Around People Who Are Already In the Job
Too often, job descriptions are written so specifically that only the person currently in the role would meet the requirements listed. Not surprisingly, this leaves companies and hiring managers frustrated – concluding the person they want is not ‘out there’ (either passively or openly looking for work).
They’re not ‘out there,’ and they’ve never been ‘out there’ because they aren’t working in the role now. No one out on the market has the organizational or tribal knowledge most job descriptions include. There are no outside candidates that will intimately know what it will take to be successful at an organization, or what advantages or drawbacks that work environment provides.
Job descriptions, then, must instead show an understanding of what a candidate will have to do to be successful, as well as account for what a candidate will need to learn once they begin the job. Hiring managers must determine what the organization can train for to prevent failure and ensure success in this unique position and environment.
Job descriptions need to frame the requirements for the role’s success instead of describing someone who is already in the job.
- Unarticulated Expectations = Unmet Expectations
Almost every problem between people – every lawsuit, every fight, every breakup, divorce, or falling out – can be attributed in some way to unmet expectations. We can say the same for why people quit or get fired from their job.
A recent HireBrain survey found that 67% of workers claimed that what they were doing on the job was materially different from the way the job was described to them. (Many even admitted they would not have accepted the job if they understood it properly.) This finding aligns with a recent study by The Muse that 72% of people who have recently changed jobs experienced “shift shock.”
So why does this matter? We find the answer in employee turnover statistics.
According to The Work Institute’s Retention Report, nearly 40% of respondents who quit their jobs did so within the first year of their employment. Two-thirds of these employees left in the first six months. Why? The work and working conditions weren’t what they expected it to be.
On the other hand, why do people fail in their jobs? They don’t live up to the expectations of their employer. According to Business Insider, of the 13 reasons someone is likely to get fired, all 13 can, in some way, be attributed to not meeting either behavioral or performance expectations.
Yet, these ‘expectation traps’ can be avoided during the hiring process by clearly and honestly articulating what the job is actually like, what it requires the employee to do day to day, and what we expect the employee to achieve.
- Over-Influence of Bias Creep
Everyone has, and is influenced by, their implicit biases. These are associations that can attribute particular positive or negative qualities to individuals unconsciously and often without awareness. According to pioneering social psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Tony Greenwald, an “individuals’ social behavior and biases are largely related to unconscious, or implicit, judgments.” This is a massive problem in hiring.
When hiring managers don’t take account for their biases, they are over-relying on the feedback they receive from a candidate during an interview. When this happens, mistakes are destined to occur.
One opportunity organizations often miss that can help to mitigate the influence of bias is to avoid “unstructured interviews by planning in advance.” Providing all stakeholders in an interview a complete brief of the expectations of the role you are hiring for, how performance will be measured, and what their individual responsibility will be during the interview mitigates the influence of implicit biases wrongly affecting judgements about a candidate. Having each stakeholder articulate the reasoning behind their judgments post interview further reduces bias.
Reflecting on your views is a key component of reducing bias influence according to the University of Southern California’s Critical Thinking Initiative, and a necessary step for avoiding mistakes while hiring.
Less Mistakes = Better Hires
While this list is not comprehensive of every mistake organizations make during a hiring process, the five mistakes listed are critical. They are too often overlooked, unknown, or failed to be accounted for. Yet, getting these five right will dramatically improve your hiring outcomes.
When hiring is over-reliant on intuition and assumptions about candidates, we make successful hires only about 30% of the time. At that rate you get better odds with a coin flip. Making a successful hire this way is a combination of chance and luck with the odds of getting it right woefully poor.
There is too much at stake to continue hiring this way.
Instead, prior to the interview, hiring managers need to look ahead and ask themselves; what will it take for a candidate to reach the goals the organization needs them to achieve? This is where hiring right needs to start. It’s a wonderful thought, a great place to begin a hiring process, and it will help account for the five fatal hiring mistakes we’ve addressed here
