One of the things that plagues our organizations are bad hiring decisions. This had led to an entire industry dedicated to selling us tests, evaluations, and services that promise to help us hire better people.
In my experience, there are two main causes for bad hiring decisions:
- We don’t take time to define what we are looking for.
- We have pressure to make a quick decision.
Generally, we are in too much of a hurry to make a hire because we don’t think we can survive without the job in question being filled. If you do the work to define specifically what you are looking for in your new hire and you find enough time to allow for patience to wait for the right candidate, your hiring decisions will improve dramatically.
Having patience isn’t easy. Most of us don’t like the hiring process. We get tired of interviewing. We also wear down in the process and it becomes temping to lower our standards. After seeing five bad candidates in a row, it becomes easy to talk yourself into hiring candidate number six who may not be what you are looking for, but definitely sucks a lot less than the previous five. Don’t fall into this trap.
After making the mistake of rushing myself into a substandard hire several times in my career (and living with the very painful consequences), I decided to implement this rule for my own hiring (and I recommend it strongly to others):
If you have to talk yourself into a candidate, don’t make the hire.
Unless you are fully on board with the candidate in front of you, keep looking. Every trade off you make will cost you dramatically in the long run.