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Have you ever hired someone only to realize, weeks later, that you may have made a mistake?
If you hire people, you KNOW you’ve made a bad hire or two.
For most of us, realization comes intuitively, but there’s some clear signs you’ve made the wrong hire.
Imagine you’ve just hired Debbie. She was fantastic in the interview and ticked all your cultural-fit boxes.
Unfortunately, a week into the job, something shifted. You felt the overall tone in the office drop. What could be causing it?
When the “new” excitement wore off and she got a bit comfortable in the office, Debbie was a real downer. She’d show up late for work (just a couple minutes), would be just a bit disrespectful, spread negative energy, and gossip. It was clear that she was creating conflict and toxicity within the office.
Often these types of behavioral issues are one of those intuitive things that you just feel is wrong. It’s important to listen to your intuition then investigate to verify.
These types of behavioral issues can be discovered in TopGrading style interviews, where you dive into every role and look for patterns, or in reference checks, with smart open-ended questions.
Who hasn’t fudged the truth, just a little, to get a job?
Edward was an expert at exaggerating his experience and skills to enter the workforce. 5 years as office manager? Check! Qualified neurosurgeon? Sure! Life coach with 20 years of experience? Heck yeah (Edward was a whole 22 years old)!
Thankfully Edward was also an expert at passing job interviews. A little help from Google (or ChatGPT) and he always had the right answers. Maybe Junior Con Man should have been added to his resume. . .
How do you determine actual skills? A deeper interview process. We believe in a multi-step process, including a short screening and cultural fit interview, a TopGrading style deep dive, and where applicable a technical and practical skills interview. These three steps will normally weed out the Edwards from your hiring process.
“But it wasn’t my fault…” Benny moaned.
Every time an assignment was late or something was wrong, Benny had an excuse or passed the buck on to a teammate.
Jim Collins, author of Good To Great, talks about people (leaders) being windows or mirrors. When something goes wrong, they either look out the window at others, or in the mirror at themselves.
Great employees take accountability for their mistakes and don’t make excuses. They get things done or ask for help to ensure deadlines are met.
While Susan was a delightful woman whom everyone loved, (how can we put this delicately?) she was just a little … lazy. Not to mention she would just sit in her chair and spin around over and over.
Great team members have drive. They get fulfillment from the impact they create daily. They look for additional tasks and ways they can be helpful.
If you want to build a great business, finding people who are self-motivated and take initiative is key.
With a whole two weeks in her new role, Nancy knew everything there was to know. As a know-it-all, Nancy was completely closed to any sort of feedback on her competence and refused to learn anything new.
Great employees are open to feedback and coachable. They’re eager to level up and improve performance.
Normally this is where we’d talk about our solution and how it solves all of these problems. Well, it doesn’t.
Yes, RascalHR provides a great Job Description and Employment Contract to cover the paperwork-side of the hiring process, but that doesn’t help your actual hiring process.
What would we do to not make a bad hire?
And if (when) you do make a bad hire, fire fast. A bad fit can be toxic to your organization.