Common Hiring Mistakes – And How to Avoid Them

December 27, 2010 in HR Best Practices

 

Planning to hire in 2011?

As optimism creeps back into our market, many food & beverage companies plan to increase their direct headcount.  If yours is among them, avoid these roadblocks to hiring success:

  • Not pre-screening candidates.  Many hiring organizations skip this step, assuming that the interview process will weed out unacceptable candidates.  But in their attempt to streamline the process, these companies are wasting valuable time interviewing people whom they’d never hire.  Pre-screening allows you to eliminate candidates:  without basic knowledge and experience levels; outside your salary limits; with long-range goals that are not aligned with your company or available position.
  • Relying solely on interviews to evaluate candidates.  Research has shown that the typical interview only increases the likelihood of selecting the best candidate by less than 2%.  Why?  Most managers don’t structure their interviews or develop scoring weights to pre-determine the best answers.  Additionally, candidates say what interviewers want to hear in order to get hired.
  • Relying on general “good guy” criteria.  Most companies want to hire good people, but merely being a good person (i.e., enthusiastic, hard working, self-motivated, etc.) is not a predictor of job success.  A potential employee may have the best attitude in the world, but if they don’t have the job skills and experience you need, they can’t hit the ground running.
  • Not investigating candidates’ backgrounds.  Sure, checking references, verifying work history and conducting background investigations are time- and labor-intensive.  But with résumé fraud on the rise, you must protect yourself from desperate job seekers who feel compelled to lie in order to get hired.

Tips for Heading-Off Hiring Mistakes

  • Evaluate candidates on skills critical for job success.  Create a position analysis to select the skills most vital to your available job, and develop interview questions (and weighted responses) to identify and evaluate those skills.  The more structured your interview process, the less likely you will be to hire someone just because he’s similar to you or because he’s a “good guy.”
  • Do more than talk.  To increase hiring success, develop several methods, in addition to the interview, for evaluating candidates.  Obviously, those methods will vary greatly based on the type of position available.  But as long as the tests and tasks you assign are directly related to the job at hand, your extra effort will provide a wealth of relevant information to help critically evaluate and compare candidates.
  • Enlist the help of a hiring expert.  As a national food & beverage recruiter, The Kinsa Group has the resources and expertise to quickly and cost-effectively deliver executive and c-level food & beverage professionals with skills, experience and behavioral traits to succeed in your organization.  We use professionally trained interviewers, a wide array of assessments, thorough background checks and satisfaction guarantees to ensure the success of your next hire.