These days, businesses often forsake fundamental recruiting best practices and miss out on truly talented C-level staff in an effort to simply fill positions as quickly as possible. Anybody is better than nobody, right?
Wrong. The practice of quickly hiring less-than-ideal personnel is actually quite costly. In 2012, a careers website connected with more than 6,000 hiring managers and human resources professionals around the globe and asked them to estimate the cost of a single bad hire, FastCompany reported. More than 40 percent of respondents said at least one bad hire in the last year had cost them $25,000 or more. Additionally, almost 30 percent could identify a bad hire that cost them at least $50,000.
Even high-powered executives with well-developed recruitment skills make these costly mistakes. For instance, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh estimates bad hires have cost his company more than $100 million over the years.
Though making the occasional recruiting error is unavoidable, you can improve your odds by identifying and addressing bad hiring behaviors. To get started, review these common errors:
You don't know what you need
Businesses continue to break down internal silos and embrace interdepartmental collaboration to achieve scalability. As a result, contributors with versatile skill sets have become a hot commodity on the job market. Unfortunately, in their quest to secure Swiss-Army-knife executives, many organizations loosen their role-planning practices and lose focus, with some coming into the hiring process with only a rough idea of what they want or need.
Fortunately, you don't have to sacrifice structure to hire staff with diverse executive experience. Instead, carefully plan out the roles you plan to fill and map your needs to definable abilities or skills, Inc. suggested. This approach obviously takes time – especially if you're hiring someone to oversee multiple business operations – but it's worth the trouble.
You focus on the wrong things
With the job market still stabilizing, employable professionals must find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. This normally involves touting extra education or training, or leveraging extraordinary life experiences to showcase key personality traits. Often, these tactics work and lead many executives to overlook recruitment red flags or pass over other more qualified candidates, FastCompany reported.
When interviewing potential C-level staff, look past personal accomplishments and focus on the things that matter. When it comes to dealing with highly-educated candidates, try getting them to use their training and knowledge on the fly. Pose hypothetical situations and have them offer up solutions. Just don't assume diplomas and past deeds predict success.
You develop overly compelling personal connections
Most high-level executives are charismatic and yearn to form genuine connections with fellow business leaders. In networking or sales situations, this tendency comes in handy but during interviews, it can be a detriment. Sometimes connection-hungry executives form strong personal bonds with candidates and make the hiring process overly personal. Soon, many find themselves defending potential hires to colleagues and passing over obvious fit issues.
To prevent such situations, institute some key internal recruitment mechanisms. First, always have candidates interview with your colleagues. If you've gone head-over-heels for a bad hire, they can bring you back down to earth. Next, come into interviews with an agenda and well-crafted questions. This will prevent the conversation from taking a personal turn.
You try to recruit on your own
Executives often want to exercise complete control over the hiring process and devote their time to finding candidates with transformative executive experience. Unfortunately, this methodology rarely works out, as most just don't have the time to oversee executive searches.
"If you find yourself settling for mediocre candidates, consider hiring a retained executive search firm."
If you find yourself settling for mediocre candidates because of time constraints, consider hiring a retained executive search firm. These organizations leverage deep industry connections to help you pinpoint potential C-level staff capable of boosting your bottom line and advancing your business. Plus, retained executive recruitment firms are in it for the long haul, meaning you'll have access to a robust talent pipeline for years to come.
Interested? Contact YES Partners today. To see some of the roles we have already successfully searched for and placed, click here.
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people – for all company functions, across many industries and globally.
