10 Reasons Why We Struggle to Hire Great People

​After more than a decade of hiring people on a daily basis I’ve seen a thing or two when it comes to good vs. bad practices as it relates to hiring employees.  During that time I’ve also made my fair share of mistakes which have offered up a lot of learning opportunities.  What I've learned over the years is that making a hiring mistake can be costly.

Hiring an employee is an interesting and vital part of business.  Interesting in that the end result is bringing on a new person into your company with the idea that they will fulfill a role to help the company move forward.  Vital, because hiring really is one of the most important activities a business can do outside of generating revenue.  Without revenue streaming in there is no need for hiring and no company for that matter.

The act of hiring is often whimsical and mythical in nature, like a unicorn.  Everyone loves to say they’re great at interviewing as they ‘know how to pick em’, they’re ‘able to sniff out the best from the worst’, etc.  I always enjoy a good chuckle when I hear comments like this because the reality is that these words often come with hollow ground. 

In fact, the act of interviewing and hiring is so tough it’s probably best we just get these two stats out ahead of time:

1. HBR did a study that found 80% of turnover is due to poor hiring decisions
2. More than 70% of companies don’t have a specific process they follow to ensure their hiring process is streamlined and effective

With stats like that you’d think companies would focus more on hiring to improve that area of the business similarly to how they spend endless amounts of time and money on activities like kaizen events and lean initiatives in order to improve yields by a couple percentage points. 

In the end the numbers don’t lie as they tell us a very sobering story – no one is perfect when it comes to hiring employees.  However the quicker we build awareness around our actual performance in the area of hiring the quicker we can begin to improve it. 

Take a look below and see where you land on these 10 hiring blunders:

1. Candidates are disrespected going through the interview process (this happens all the time and is one of the quickest ways to lose a great candidate; disrespect comes in the form of wasting people’s time, not getting back to people, treating them poorly during the onsite interview, etc.)
2. Manager has unrealistic expectations and makes hiring decisions based on being able to perform immediately rather than long term success
3. Don’t know what they’re looking for in a candidate so they interview dozens of people hoping to figure it out along the way (this often times is an unspoken action as few people will openly admit to their peers they don’t know what they’re doing)
4. The job description used to search and vet candidates isn’t the same as the real job responsibilities
5. Interviewing is based around job tasks, not the expected performance results
6. Interview process is horrific (it goes months on end with weeks of down time in between, involving several interviews with dozens of people
7. Fails to connect what the company offers with a candidates career motivations (when this happens companies are hiring people to fill a job, not a career)
8. Don’t know how to find the best candidates (hint – only about 11% of people find their job on the internet so if your strategy is to solely to use technology you’re missing out on 89% of the rest of the workforce)
9. They are reactive, not proactive, in hiring
10. They have entire teams or departments involved the hiring decision (often times those people aren’t trained on how to interview and don’t understand the true needs of the job)

 
Do you or your company fall short in any of these areas? 
 
If so you’ve got an opportunity to improve the process and create a great hiring experience for the sake of your new hire and company’s performance in the future.