The Top 10 Hiring Mistakes
Executive Coaching Organization, Vistage International, Tells You What Works
September 18, 2008, SAN DIEGO – Few areas have more immediate and lasting impact on organizations than recruiting and hiring employees. If you don't get the right people in the right jobs, you can't accomplish your organizational goals and objectives. Vistage International, the world’s leading executive coaching organization and the Voice of Main Street Business, presents hiring knowledge that business owners need to grow. Hiring experts, Barry Deutsch and Brad Remillard, have conducted numerous hiring studies to determine what works well and what doesn’t. Here are their findings on the top hiring mistakes:
- Inadequate job descriptions. The job descriptions that drove the hiring process focused solely on experience and skills rather than company expectations for the position.
- Superficial interviewing. The hiring process did not put candidates under the magnifying glass, verify claims or check facts.
- Inappropriate prerequisites used too early in the selection process. An over-emphasis on specific education, technical skills, and industry experience screened out qualified candidates.
- Snap judgment. Hiring teams relied too heavily on first impressions to make final hiring decisions.
- Historical bias. Hiring teams used only past performance to predict future results.
- Performance bias. Hiring team failed to understand that interview behavior and job performance are two different things, which resulted in making an offer to the "best actor," not the best candidate.
- Fishing in shallow waters. Structuring the search to attract only the bottom third aggressive candidates; not actively seeking out selective "sleeper" candidates.
- Failure to probe for core success factors. Not looking for evidence of the five best predictors of long-term success -- self-motivation, leadership, comparable past performance, job-specific problem solving and adaptability.
- Ignoring top candidate's needs. Not understanding what motivates top talent to take a job.
- Desperation hiring. Not budgeting enough time for the search, resulting in shallow sourcing and superficial interviews.
The key to hiring effectively is to have a staffing system that provides a template, a model and a process for those who recruit, screen, interview and hire new employees. Staffing systems dramatically increase a business’s odds of getting the right person in the job with each new hire. To learn the steps for creating a hiring system see Vistage International’s hiring best practices report.
Media Contact: Lois Arbogast, Vistage International- 858.509.5861