How to avoid bad hires by overhauling your interview process

Recruitment can be a tricky process. You need to find the best person to fill a position; not only someone who is capable of doing the job well, but also someone who will fit in with the rest of your team. To ensure you’re getting the fit right, you also need to predict whether the candidate will feel fulfilled within the position, feel valued and feel part of the culture.

This is where things can get a bit muddy. Small to medium sized businesses often struggle with the recruitment process as they may not have to hire often and therefore are not going through the process of recruiting and interviewing enough to keep up a consistent standard of practice.

If a small to medium sized business has a HR department they may have increased success hiring the right person for the job as they will likely recruit frequently and are generally far more accustomed to interviewing. However, regardless of who is managing the recruitment process, using an intuitive hiring approach only; that is, making a hiring decision based on ‘feeling good’ about or liking someone, will mean increasing the risk of making a bad hire. In fact research tells us using this method we get a top performer only about 25% of the time!

Reflect for a moment on the last major purchasing decision you made, for example a laptop, Smart TV or car. It’s highly probable your decision was not solely based on intuition but that you researched and obtained as much data as possible on your potential purchase and a combination of both informed your final decision.

Why should the process be different when hiring someone for your business? Relying solely on resumes (which may be embellished), interviews and references does not provide us with the objective data we need to increase our success rate of hiring the right people.

What is a bad hire?

A bad hire is a person who ultimately doesn’t suit the role or the business. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with that individual – just that they don’t fit that role or that organisation. This could be for any number of reasons, such as a cultural misfit or the wrong skill set or approach.

Why is a bad hire so bad?

Employing someone and then realising they were a bad hire can impact your business in many ways.

Hiring the wrong people who don’t perform as expected can cost your business significantly. When a person has the right fit in their role, they enjoy the work they do and as a result productivity and employee engagement increases. Take the opportunity and employee engagement cost for example. Studies of more than 650,000 people by Towers Watson demonstrated that companies with high levels of employee engagement enjoyed:

– 19.2% increase in operating income in the 12 months (vs a 32.7% decline)
– 13.7% rise in net income (vs a 3.8% decline)
– 27.8% increase in earnings-per-share (EPS) (vs an 11.2% decline)

If you don’t have the right people in your business, you miss out on this great opportunity.

Additionally the costs of recruitment, especially if those people don’t remain in your business, are extremely high. This includes the money and time it takes to advertise, interview and accept a new employee. Then you have to train them, build their skills and invest time, energy, resources and money into doing so. By then you realise that this position for this person was not a good fit or they leave after a few months. This creates a great deal of extra strain on your business and team.

Consultancy Firm Retail Solution recently did a survey that found staff turnover in the first 12 months of hire is costing $3.8 billion in lost productivity across Australia. With those figures it’s easy to see why recruiting the right people is paramount to your business’ success!

Hiring the wrong person for the role, and subsequently losing them, might also give your business a negative brand or reputation hit. Remember that your current and ex-employees are your brand advocates and can have a huge impact on how the rest of the world sees you, especially with social media sharing and employer reviews on the rise.

How to overhaul your recruitment and interview process

Ideally, your recruitment process would look like this: you have identified a role that needs to be filled within your business. Once you have developed your job description you should create a role benchmark for the position. There are lots of tools out there to help you do this but we recommend the ProfileXT assessment as it’s the most accurate on the market and has benchmarking capabilities that allow you to scientifically measure and quantify the critical success attributes of the role unique to your organisation.

Then using the information from the role benchmark you can develop a targeted job advertisement (or we can help!) What do we mean by a targeted job ad? Most job ads these days can be a bit blah and look more like a job description than an engaging, exciting invitation to apply for a role. We recommend really “speaking” to potential candidates in the ad by explaining what is required to be a top performer in the role and by answering the burning question for the applicant – What’s in it for me?

You can include some screening questions in your advertisement to make sure candidates possess those basic skills required to do the role. These are skills you are just not willing to train for, such as email etiquette, English grammar or Microsoft skills. We recommend using an online skills assessment as part of the process. These are cost effective, short online questionnaires that can be customised if you wish and provide a rating on the candidate’s knowledge to help you significantly speed up screening applications.

Once you have reviewed the resumes, conduct the first screening interview either by phone or in person. Then develop a shortlist and invite candidates in for their first face to face interview. It’s in these interviews where you will confirm the skills, qualifications and experience of the candidates.

You then develop your shortened shortlist, and invite those people to complete an objective behavioural online assessment.

This process of objective behavioural assessments gives you a full understanding of a candidate’s abilities, personality traits, behaviours, interests and preferred learning styles. In addition you also gain insights into the candidate’s interests which helps you understand if they are interested in the type of work on offer. Making people decisions is about information and this objective data will help you immensely as you make your final decisions and offer the position.

Overall, the best thing you can do for your business is to determine fit, rather than just to verify the details of the candidate’s resume. Your goal should be to use the interview to determine whether your candidate is a fit with the role and whether they will fit into your existing team. This is where our assessment tools such as the ProfileXT assessment tool that measures JobFit™ can help.

What should I look for in an assessment tool?

A good assessment tool will cover the entire employee lifecycle, from developing the job description, through to the process of selecting, hiring, and developing them.

Ideally the assessment tool should be normed for the population and allow you to develop benchmarks that are unique to your team and culture.

The ProfileXT assessment does this really well as it shows at a glance how the candidate compares to the benchmark of the role and provides you with an interview guide report complete with suggested questions that help you to drill into any potential obstacles to success.

By using an online assessment tool such as ProfileXT, you can determine how well a candidate will fit within your workplace culture. ProfileXT allows you to look at the behaviours, attitudes and personalities of candidates as compared to the rest of your team, and helps you understand whether the candidate will be a good fit or not – this is the JobFit™ aspect.

JobFit™ also assesses the mental and physical demands of the role, the atmosphere and environment, and desired personality and behavioural traits, to give an outline of the type of person best suited for that role. This has proven to be extremely useful for businesses in helping them avoid bad hires.

Put simply, the ProfileXT assessment and JobFit™ give you essential objective data that cannot be determined by a traditional interview.

The facts are that the ProfileXT assessment, the basis of JobFit™, has the highest predictive reliability of any assessments in the marketplace. Imagine having such a deep understanding of your new employee before they even begin work!

Where to from here?

It’s important to note that you don’t have to overhaul your recruitment process completely to successfully hire the right person. You can keep doing what you’re doing when it comes to finding and narrowing down to your shortlist of candidates. Then, once you have developed your shortlist, you can assess those people and compare them to the role benchmark to see how they fit. An objective assessment tool, such as ProfileXT, can easily dovetail your existing process.

So, are you sick of hiring the wrong people in your business? Contact us today to start overhauling your hiring and interview process.