Here are a few ways to consistently hire the wrong person for your organization:

• Be reactive in your recruiting methods. If your organization doesn’t employ a number of proactive recruiting measures, you’ll quickly find yourself scrambling to find talent when a vacancy hits. Creating and engaging in an employment brand that attracts the strongest talent in your industry, will quickly funnel a large pool of interested, driven, and experienced talent to you. Respond to applicants even if you do not have an available opening and keep in mind any growth or expansion that you may be facing in the near future.
• Don’t prepare yourself before recruiting. Take the time to reevaluate the job description, skills and experience required, and exactly what you’d be looking for an in ideal candidate. Not doing so ahead of time can quickly lead to you creating the role around someone based on your interviews, interviewing candidates who do not meet the requirements, or not finding qualified talent because you haven’t reevaluated the skills and pay scale that are appropriate for the position.
• Compromise your expectations. Hiring someone because they have years of experience while knowing they won’t be a good fit for your organization can cause more harm than good. Disrupting the department or organization’s culture or process flow to quickly fill a vacancy and you’ll quickly end up with a number of personnel and performance issues.
• Skip steps in the process. You’ve built your hiring process hopefully based on results. Skipping crucial steps such as reference checking, skills testing, and initial phone screenings can quickly cause you to miss key components in a candidate’s qualifications or disqualifications. If the position is worth filling, it’s worth filling with the right candidate.
• Don’t be transparent. Want to quickly hire someone who doesn’t fit the role or have an interest in engaging in the role? Mislead them about everything from the job details, company culture, to the work environment. It won’t take long for them to find out that they were never a good fit in the first place.

Hiring the right person is like preparing a recipe. Without preparation and forethought you can quickly find yourself settling for less than excellent results and substituting key components to get the task accomplished. As a hiring professional, take pride in your process, experience, and intuition. Unfortunately, our jobs are not always as quickly moving as an assembly line but our finished product should be nothing short of excellence in quality. If you still find yourself unsure about a hiring decision, enlist the advice of others. Consider having another department manager or HR representative interview your final choices or have your final candidates speak to a member of your department to see if they gain any additional insight. Many staffing agencies offer trial hire services which allow you and the candidate to try out the working relationship for a period of 90 or 180 days before committing to a direct hire role.

Want to learn more about how you can gain access to Trillium’s national network of top level talent? Contact us today!  If you are a stand out in your profession and seeking contingent or long term career opportunities, visit our job seekers section for more information!

Trillium, a national leader in staffing and recruitment is a valued staffing partner to over 5,000 companies nationwide. Trillium is privately owned by Oskar René Poch.