Part One – It Starts With Hiring
We all dream of having the perfect employee. You know the one, who never makes a mistake, who can anticipate our next need (even before we have it), who handles themselves and your customers with the grace of saint, the one that will simply make your life better…the perfect employee.
Okay, its time to wake up. Even if you were to look at yourself, and be honest, you know that likely you could even manage to be your own perfect employee. There is no doubt, great employees do not appear, they are made.
So why don’t more of us have them?
In this two part series, we are going to explore exactly that. This week, we will talk about the process of hiring and some of the pitfalls.
According to Leadership IQ, 46 percent of newly hired employees will fail within the first 18 months. It is not surprising when you consider that 82 percent of managers reported that in hindsight, the interviews elicited clues the employees might not be a right fit, but they decided to bypass their intuition.
In my experience, here are the main reasons the hiring process fails:
- The manager or supervisor doesn’t put in the required time needed to focus on making a good decision. They are too busy focused on other things and don’t really give the process the attention that is needs.
- They settle on the best of the group of applicants, rather than being willing to go out and seek more applicants. Many times, a hire is needed now, to they compromise quality for the sake of time, which only costs in the long run.
- They focus on technical skills and education without focusing on some of the other skills like, emotional intelligence, problem solving, temperament, motivation, etc. You have a team of people working in your company and a group of people you are serving. More times than not, fit comes down to personality.
- Manager tell themselves, they can train the individual in the things they are missing, forgetting that they, themselves have a lot on their plate and likely don’t have the time needed to do so. I get this, but in the hiring process this is just you trying to convince yourself it will be okay and a lot of times it won’t be.
- They haven’t taken the time to get clear on what they are really looking for in the position. Defining what is really important in a position is more than just the job title. Defining the actual responsibilities and then the skills and attributes they will require is critical in being able to evaluate a person.
- They rely more on what the applicant says, rather than looking at what they have demonstrated. When you are hiring, likely the person in front of you is going to tell you exactly what you want to hear. For example, they will tell you how much they “love doing sales” but that doesn’t mean they do. Look at their resume. Have they ever done sales? Can they tell you about their accomplishments? If you don’t see evidence, it is up to you to get proof.
The combination of these things makes hiring the right individual somewhat of a challenge. To get the right person you need to be prepared to give it the time and energy it needs to get the right person and you need to be unwilling to compromise. Recognizing when you are settling will take you a long way, in improving your hiring skills.
But always remember your job isn’t done once you hire them, it is all about what you. Next week, we will go into the second thing to improve your odds of finding and keeping great employees…stay tune!
