Monday, May 19, 2014

10 Ways to Make Good Hiring Decisions Out of Bad Decisions

Have you ever wondered why hiring success rates are only at 50%? Perhaps you’re guilty of one of the 10 Ways to Make a Bad Hiring Decision.
  1. Make an emotional decision and justify it with facts. It’s easy to make a quick judgment on a candidate based on the 4 A’s: attractive, articulate, assertive, and/or affable. It’s been shown that candidates who pass one of these tests are often asked easier questions during an interview and undergo less scrutiny during the hiring process. Contradictory or negative information is ignored.  Unwittingly, candidates who don’t meet the “first impression” test don’t move to the next step.
  2. Disregard or ignore objective data if it contradicts your personal beliefs. It’s tough to eliminate a candidate you like, regardless of their lack of expertise, shady background, or inability to answer your questions. Rather than go with the truth, you take the easy route, and trust your gut instead to make a hiring decision.
  3. Skip the research. When you have a short amount of time to find someone for a critical role, the first good candidate who comes along is the one you onboard. After all, one of your key performance metrics is Time to Hire, and moving ahead with an offer quickly makes your productivity on paper skyrocket.
  4. Word of mouth is a powerful tool. Someone comes to you and tells you about a friend or family member with a great background. There happens to be an opening that may work. The clock is ticking and, often, internal referrals are a good source for new hires. You have a conversation with the friend and make a decision on the spot.
  5. When bad hiring decisions are made, you figure it’s because you aren’t paying enough. Research may correctly or incorrectly indicate your company doesn’t pay fair market wages. You reason that the consequence for this inequity is poor access to ‘A’ players. You figure your talent pool is more limited and you’re going to occasionally make the wrong hiring decision. All in all, it won’t happen this time.
  6. All candidates want the job, and will come to work with a good attitude and enthusiasm.  You assume a candidate knows proper business etiquette and will conduct himself with integrity and loyalty. This is his shot at the brass ring and he wants to succeed. He will work hard to prove he is capable of great things.
  7. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You keep hearing about great new technologies that will make your life easier, yet trying them isn’t so appetizing. You were burned before or you don’t have the time to ramp up and really make it work for you. It’s just too complicated or tedious.
  8. All I need to know about a candidate I can learn on the Internet. You use a search engine, check out a LinkedIn profile, or review activity on Twitter or Facebook. These sources tell you the real story. You’ve performed adequate due diligence.
  9. The length of the resume was really long and the candidate has years of experience in the field. A key barometer for success is how many degrees a candidate has earned, which graduate school she has attended, or how many years she worked at a top shelf firm. If he earned that award or was vetted by that last corporation on his resume, he’s obviously a star.
  10. Unemployment is so high that candidates will do anything to convince me to hire them. All I have to do is distribute hundreds of emails. Either by direct contact or referrals; I’ll engage the high potential candidates. It doesn’t matter what process I put a candidate through, they’ll do anything I ask to get the job I’ve posted.
10 Easy Ways to Change Bad Hiring Decisions into Good Hiring Decisions

According to a 2013 CareerBuilder Study of Candidate and Recruiter Behavior, the average cost to find and engage 26% of new hires is above $10,000. An additional 25% is just below $10,000. It’s also been shown that 41% of bad hires cost a business $25,000 annually and another 27% of bad hires can cost more than $50,000.

Hiring managers say the top reasons they make bad hiring decisions are a result of:
  • The need to fill the job quickly
  • Insufficient talent intelligence
  • Lack of application review
  • Failure to check references 
It’s unfortunate that the most cited causes leading to bad hires can be prevented. Simply put, the proper background screening provider can save you from making the wrong hiring decision, improve your bad hire rates, and reduce costs. If any of these are familiar, perhaps you should re-evaluate your hiring program. A good background screening provider can offer you depth and breadth of products to help.
  1. Make your hiring decision based on fact. Quick judgment on a candidate, predicated on the 4 A’s: attractive, articulate, assertive, and/or affable, is an unhealthy practice that can result in legal risk. Banish forever the “first impression” test. If in doubt, check the volumes of lawsuits employers have lost because of disparate treatment in hiring practices. Guidance and support to build and manage a legally compliant hiring program, should be available through your background screening provider.
  2. Use objective data, even if it contradicts your personal beliefs. If you’re not using objective data, you probably aren’t compliant with legal guidelines. HR professionals should only use relevant information, including the data submitted by a candidate, to do a thorough and individual hiring assessment. In addition, monitor and track your hiring choices on a consistent basis.
  3. Spotlight the research. Start with accurate and verified data, perform a more thorough match between a candidate and his/her court records, and use every piece of data you can find to secure a 360° profile.  An aggressive background screen should include alias and maiden names, and research in counties where a candidate lived, worked, and was educated.
  4. Word of mouth is a dangerous tool. Friends hiring friends may cause disparate treatment or impact. This may be unintentional, but may rise from treating people differently based on their race or other protected characteristics, identified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As an HR professional, you never purposely discriminate, however, you must be mindful of differences in employment outcomes for members of particular groups, having nothing to do with job performance. Set up formal hiring policies and procedures that are compliant with state and federal laws and make sure you follow them. Your applicant tracking system/HRIS should be able to help align best practice with operational efficiency.
  5. Wage can’t really be correlated with talent value. Although there are plenty of guides that provide up-to-date wage data and industry benchmarks, caveat emptor (buyer beware). Although you may think your pay scale falls beneath industry standards, hiring should never be predicated on a candidate’s willingness to accept your offer. In this case, the adage, “You get what you pay for,” does not fit. You get what you fairly and reasonably investigate. Use background screening, verifications and references, along with a robust drug screen, as your fulcrum for decision making. Empower your HR organization to hire only those who meet your standard, rather than those who are willing to take what you can pay.
  6. “If You Build It, He Will Come” is a highly misused quote. For a long time, HR professionals have been lulled into the proverbial “Field of Dreams”. You have come to believe that if you hire them, they will contribute. Not exactly. Why would you assume that hiring or promoting someone into a new job would result in immediate success? Why would you expect that an application, a resume, and an interview or two, are the foundation for a successful hiring campaign? Experience and research reveal they only tell you what the candidate wants you to know. Good, creative writing and strong impression management skills are not true indicators of adequate credentials and character attributes. These are items that should be confirmed and validated through a formally documented background screening program.
  7. Technology is your friend. If you’re not using technology to help you make hiring decisions, you are missing a huge opportunity to reduce business expense and increase data privacy. Select an applicant tracking system (ATS) or human resource information system (HRIS) to function as your single point of hiring information. Permission based and online access to the status of background checks 24/7, flexible configuration to meet your specific HR workflows, file and note attachment, and FCRA adverse action management are a few of the advantages you should exploit.
  8. Net surfing is not a hiring ‘best practice’. Social media for hiring purposes is at an all-time high; 92% of companies use Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for recruiting, and 73% claim they hired successfully with social media. While you may have discovered a treasure trove of information on candidates by using social media, you could land in legal hot water. Just because information is online does not mean it is risk free or even true. There are well documented reasons why the use of web sites, search engines, and other internet resources cause discrimination, privacy, accuracy, and authenticity issues. Seek an expert to help you circumvent legal landmines and practical risks. There are more beneficial and less risky methods to screen a candidate.
  9. A long resume may or may not be a true reflection of talent. Resume fraud is a big problem. Estimates are that 46%-55% of resumes submitted by candidates contain some measure of false information. This increases to 70% for college students, who openly admit they would lie on their resume in order to get the job they want. Lies include fraudulent degrees, altered employment dates, inflated salary claims, inaccurate job titles/descriptions, and falsified references. There is only one way to mitigate this risk. Your background screening program should include a solid education, employment, and reference verification process. This is as important, if not more important than a criminal background check and is not the place to protect your budget.
  10. Identify the candidates who will do anything to convince you to hire them, but nothing to add value to your organization. Candidates may do or say anything to convince you to hire them. Unfortunately, once hired, they may do nothing to convince you to keep them. Employees late or absent during the first week of employment have a 35% likelihood of violating another policy and usually miss many more days during their tenure. Personal web time and texting, especially when the content says something like, “My new job sucks!” isn’t going to win any awards. There’s only one sure way to avoid this hiring blunder; thoroughly investigate your candidate’s claims and credentials. Audit the documents they’ve submitted to you as part of the candidate process, and look for gaps, omissions, and errors. If you fail to have the resources to do a thorough vetting, hire a good background screening provider to do it for you. 

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