Common Hiring Mistakes to Avoid

Hiring is an incredibly tedious process that can be both frustrating and expensive for all involved. From a business perspective, finding the right person at the right time to fill a job can seem near impossible. From a candidate perspective, getting hiring managers to see you beyond your resume experience and past your awkward interviewing skills is taxing.

Hiring comes with potential pitfalls for an organization’s culture, as the wrong person can cause waves and have a detrimental impact on productivity. Here are some of the common mistakes hiring managers make when looking for the perfect candidate, and how to find the right person to foster a great company culture.

Hiring too Quickly

If your goal is to get someone into an open role as quickly as possible, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with the wrong person. Managing people as a company asset goes beyond employee scheduling (more details here) and improving productivity. You need to find the right people that blend well in the melting pot that makes up a company culture.

When you hire someone to do a job, you aren’t looking at things like their values, how their personality will work in an organization, and if they have the potential for growth. Hiring the right person is the equivalent of making a long-term investment, which necessitates consideration and critical thinking over an acceptable length of time.

Focusing on the Resume or Interview

There are a lot of driven, intelligent people that lack experience on a resume. As such, it is essential that hiring managers look beyond the resume and assess someone’s potential as an employee. Perhaps they don’t know the ins and outs of your business’s accounting software, but they have a desire to learn and advance in their career. These factors can’t be captured on paper, so it is up to the hiring manager to find these hidden gems.

Interviews are a great way to get to know someone, but some people don’t interview well, no matter how skilled they are. The pressure of a face-to-face meeting which will ultimately determine the course of their career is such that they aren’t able to adequately convey their value as an employee. On the other side of things, some people have charming, genial personalities but don’t have the work ethic to back them up. Hiring managers need to know the difference and see through the presentation.

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Attracting Top Talent

To attract the best people to work in your organization and cultivate a powerful company culture, you need to stop thinking about finding the right person for a job. Instead, look at how you can alter a job to fit the right person. By taking a more fluid approach to your job description processes and becoming adaptable, you can hire people who don’t quite fit the job you’re hiring for but have the skills and drive to do incredible things for your business.

To ensure the longevity of a business, you need to be willing to present people opportunities to not only move up but move sideways. If you hire people with a diverse skill set that doesn’t fit the confines of the job they apply for, think of how you can use their skills in other areas of the organization.

Value Alignment

Every successful organization has a set of values or a mission statement that ties into their overall brand strategy and provides the shape of their company culture. Consider Google’s work hard, play hard mentality. This approach is extremely motivating for some people, while could be viewed as unnecessarily excessive and unproductive by a different type of personality.

To cultivate a great company culture, you need to find the people whose values and work style are in alignment with that of the organization. Otherwise, you’ll have a misalignment and lose someone, no matter how skilled or proficient they are at their job.

When hiring, take your time and look beyond what’s presented to you on paper or during an interview. Consider how someone would interact with others in the organization, and make your decision based on the whole person.

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