What a great question.  Every business we work with, has not just one hiring disaster, but generally a few more.  The longer in business the more stories of that ‘bad hire’.  While some of these make great stories, especially over your beverage of choice, hiring disasters are on average three to five times costlier to an organization, than simply what you paid them. Mistakes are expensive in terms of the effort and money that is paid and lost, the time that is wasted that could have been invested with a better candidate, as well as the demoralization that occurs in a company with high employee turnover. So, the question is what can we do to avoid these situations?
What lessons can we learn from other companies?  What have they done to improve their odds of avoiding these costly blunders.

 

Here are four rules we recommend for our clients to follow, when interviewing potential candidates:

 

1. Always interview at least three people for a position. Even if you like the first interviewee and feel that individual is suitable, discipline yourself to interview at least two others. Many large companies will not hire a person until they have interviewed ten or fifteen candidates for the spot. The more people you interview, the greater the selection of choices you will have, and the more likely it is that you will make the right choice.

 

2. Interview the candidate you like in three different places. It is amazing how the personality of a person can change when you move the interview setting from your office to a coffee shop across the street. Candidates will usually be at their very best in the first interview. If they were pretending, the veneer will quickly come off in subsequent meetings.  There is another important reason to change venues for each meeting. That’s exactly what many employees need to be able to do to be successful in their jobs: They will have to work with many different types of people in many different locations.

 

3. Have the candidate interviewed by at least three different people for a post interview review. The more people on the team who buy-in to the selection of a particular candidate, the better chance that the staff will have a vested interest in helping the new person be successful.

 

4. Hire slow, fire fast. Please don’t be shy and explain this strategy upfront in the interview.  Their reaction will tell you a lot.  Oh, and by the way, if you do hire and it does not work, please terminate them quickly.

So what are your rules to avoid a hiring disaster?  We would love to hear from you.