Make sure your next hire is awesome!
For 15 years I’ve been successfully avoiding bad hires, building successful teams to deliver outstanding results. I’d like to show you how too!
I’m keen to help organisations avoid the most common pitfalls that lead to poor hiring decisions, including trusting the person that has a commission check associated with their candidate being chosen by you.
I had a past employee call me very recently after accepting a job with a company, only to find the day she arrived they announced a massive restructure, and her role had been disestablished.
She called me after talking to the recruitment consultant who placed her. His advice was to ride it out! I wonder what his advice will be after his guarantee period expires?
She’s an outstanding worker, and could get another job within days (I’m now in the process of creating a role here for her). No imagination required here to see that he’s only interested in keeping his commission safe.
To avoid the first mistake - don't trust the recruitment consultant!
I know they’re not all the same, I have many friends who are recruitment consultants and very good at what they do (I’m expecting calls from them before you’ve finished reading this), but odds are, they’re going to do everything they can to convince you they have the best candidate.
Unless, heaven forbid, they are exclusive with you and have another role they’re trying to fill with another client where they have to compete for the business – who do you think is getting the best candidate now?
Please don’t get me wrong, recruitment consultants work their butts off for their money. I’m not saying don’t use them. DIY recruiting is a massive waste of your time and should be listed here as the worst recruiting mistake unless you have your own in-house recruitment team.
What I am saying, is don’t trust them with the final decision – you need to make the final decision and you need better tools to do it.
don't rely on reference checks
You’d think that no-one would provide a reference who wasn’t going to rave about them right?
Well almost everyone knows someone that can talk about the toxic employee who put them down as a reference without checking first. Clearly that person is not going to get a job (they probably won’t even make it through screening), although it’s always humorous when they do.
The sane population is going to only include references from people they know are going to rave about them.
Without knowing exactly what you need to check for, you may as well not bother doing them. If you are going to do them, get someone independent to do them, not your recruitment consultant.
If you’re still with me here, once again, I’m not saying reference checks shouldn’t be done.
They must be done, you have an obligation to the rest of your team, your managers, shareholders and customers to protect their interests (and safety) by recruiting the best people possible.
I’m not saying don’t use these important tools – I am definitely saying don’t rely on them! You need better tools, and they are readily available.
For what’s normally only 10% of your recruitment costs, robust and globally proven on normal populations (I can explain what this means if you’re interested), online psychological profiling is available that offers considerably more insight to your candidates true identity.
These tests measure among many other things; occupational preference (will your candidate enjoy the role, we all perform better when we’re doing something we enjoy), inductive, verbal and numerical reasoning (tests are tailored to test the abilities that are critical to the role’s success).