Employers tend to make a ton of mistakes during the whole recruiting, interviewing and hiring process. Therefore your company’s hiring manager needs to evaluate and re-evaluate his/her hiring practices if bad employees are being hired on a regular basis. In the following article we discuss a few mistakes that hiring managers make when hiring new talent…
1. Going too Narrow with Job Specifications
Every manager wants to hire the best talent while being in the rush. New employees are usually hired because a project requires the right help or a specific set of skills. But since most hiring managers don’t have the time to cover the training process, they go overly narrow with the job specifications, which is a mistake.
What every hiring manager needs to realize is this: When you hire somebody, you’re paying for his abilities, and not for specialized knowledge of a tool or technique. A good hire will almost always learn how to use the tool you hand him or her and if he lacks some skills he or she will be able to develop them with a bit of guidance from you.
2. Hiring What Comes Along
The traditional way to recruit and hire is based on the faulty and overused selection model. Running ads and holding job fairs, you create a ‘selection bias’, where the process you’re using biases the overall outcome of your employee search. In other words, you only hire those individuals who just come along, rather than those that you want to hire.
The solution is to identify those talented people who aren’t looking for a new job actively, but are available through the conventional means. If you don’t go this way, you will be severely limiting the opportunity to hire the best talent in more then one way.
3. Not Adequately Carrying Out Reference Checks
In a lot of companies, reference checks are not at all adequate. The hiring manager needs to go into more details and should use their expertise to have a line of questioning without compromising on any area. There’s a difference between a regular HR carrying out a reference check and a hiring manager doing so – this is the difference your hiring manager needs to understand.
When carrying out an reference check, the hiring manager shouldn’t ignore the most important of all questions which is, “If you could have Tom work for your company again, would you want to hire him?”. This is usually asked at the end of the reference call, and it’s the answer plus the reaction of the other manager that will help your manager take a better decision.
Conclusion
Right from carrying out an effective employment background check to taking care of the smaller hiring details, your hiring manager needs to look into every aspect of hiring to ensure that he or she doesn’t end up hiring the wrong people.
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