How Hiring Mistakes Can Actually Improve Your Small Business

The initial hiring stage can be challenging for many small businesses.  You are just starting to figure things out such as the staff you need, the roles each individual will play in the business, along with making sure that your compensation program is competitive in the industry.

No matter how much research you do or how many people you interview, there will be hiring mistakes made along the way.  It’s important that you pay attention to these mistakes and learn from them in order to improve your hiring process.

There are many ways hiring mistakes can help us to improve our hiring process.

Hiring mistakes provide us the ability to create useful employee profiles.

When you hire, it is important to keep track of the type of people you are hiring for certain jobs.  Document what industry they came from, how much experience they had, what their education was, etc.

In addition, if you are able to have your candidates complete profile assessments in the final stages of interviews, this is valuable information to hang on to for each hire.  These assessments will help you understand the type of training that works best for each hire, the type of environment they work best in, etc.

The purpose of creating these detailed files on each hire is to be able to understand the type of candidate who is most successful in the position.  As you continue on in your future hiring process, you will be able to assess new candidates based on their backgrounds and assessments in comparison to previous hires and what you know works.

For example, if you notice that entry level candidates with degrees in communication tend to have a high success rate in your sales positions, you can target similar candidates in your future hiring.

Also, let’s not forget that this data will help to provide your HR and Recruitment with keywords to look for in their candidate searches.  This will ensure that you receive the talent you are looking for early on in your searches.

Hiring mistakes give us the ability to develop clear training expectations.

When you collect data on each new hire regarding the progress they make, you will eventually have enough data to prove what is a realistic expectation when it comes to training timeframe requirements for each job.

When you have successful hires to base this data off of, you will quickly learn when you have made a hiring mistake simply by the new hire’s performance during the initial training period.  Understanding how long it should take a successful new hire to learn the job will help you in setting expectations for your new hire and for yourself.

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What are some other ways hiring mistakes make us better?