Employers: Bad Hires Can Cost You Millions. Can You Prevent Bad Hires? Probably Not, but Here’s Four Tips to Minimize Them

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up when trying to keep momentum for many corporate workflows: including the hiring process. The best assessments, tests and various rounds of interviews can’t predict if someone will succeed or fail in a position. However, there are some things hiring managers and HR leaders can do to ensure they are at least covering all their bases when finding a perfect candidate match for an open role.

Here’s 4 tips to minimize the potential bad-hire:

1. Be aware of interview bias. Avoid it yourself, and coach hiring managers as well. Just because you like someone doesn’t make them the best fit for the job.

2. Snuff out resume fluffing. Ask for clear examples for bulleted achievements. For example, if a candidate says they produced $2M in revenue, ask them for a summary for exactly how they did that.

3. This may be an obvious one but define upfront what a “top candidate” is and align on what those job requirements are (vs. putting everything under the kitchen sink on a job posting). Have tiers of what is a “must have” vs. “nice to have” and make sure they are reasonable. The more things you list the more someone could “disqualify” themselves. Often, several positions are lumped into one, which is an unreasonable expectation. Once you narrow down exactly what is foundational for success, stick with that 100% (shameless plug: our back-end platform does this for you!).

4. Ensure a cultural fit. This is another “of course” line item, but this is tricky to do with such limited interviews. Try to assess if the values and beliefs that naturally may come out during interview questions align with the company’s mission and values. For example, some companies may be more laid-back so longer timelines for projects are OK. On the other hand, a start-up culture needs to assess if the employee seems dependent on external resources or can be more “scrappy”.