If you have ever been responsible for making hiring decisions in a company you know only too well that when you hire the wrong person, it can have far reaching and damaging consequences!
Recruitment companies owe a fair slice of their revenues to those negative experiences, that’s why a lot of companies outsource recruitment to these third parties – to minimise the risk of selecting the wrong person from all the candidates that put their resumes forward, when a position is advertised as available.
Let’s face it, no business decision maker worth their salt wants to hire the wrong person for a job. Not only because they’ll need to find a replacement candidate sooner than they’d like but also because making bad hiring choices drains energy and time and can cost a business in a number of ways.
Clearly, the most obvious costs relate to profitability and have direct bearing on budgets and balance sheets.
According to Mariah De Leon, in her article for Entrepreneur.com, those financial costs include paying a salary to someone who may not be performing to your expectations, additional training and potential severance pay – not to mention the costs you’ll incur to conduct another employee search and hire another replacement.
HRDive.com estimates replacement costs at a minimum of 33% of annual salary – with more senior and specialised roles costing even more.
And these are just the direct costs, to which must be added the indirect costs. These include;
- Productivity costs
Any staff involved in onboarding/training new hires or managing personality conflicts between the new hire and existing staff, are going to be less productive. Measuring that down time is almost impossible but the cost is there nonetheless.
Then there is the new hires direct supervisor – how much time do they spend managing poorly performing employees?
And let us not forget that, If the new hire is in a customer facing role, negative impacts on sales always result.
- Staff morale costs
As managers and supervisors are spending time and money trying to correct the mistake of hiring the wrong person, the rest of your team may become dissatisfied or disengaged.
It’s difficult to stay motivated when one team member requires so much attention or manages to bring the whole team down. Ninety-five percent of financial executives surveyed by Robert Half International said that making a bad hire decision at least somewhat affects the morale of the team, and 35 percent said a poor hire greatly influences employee morale.
In many cases, bad hires do not get along with other employees, which can cause additional problems for the cohesiveness of your team.
- Reputation costs
In today’s world of transparency, job seekers are connected to information 24/7 and can more easily evaluate what is and isn’t working at your company — based on reviews from employees themselves. If you have a bad hire in the mix, you should monitor your reputation closely to make sure this individual isn’t causing a bad experience for the rest of your team or, even worse, with your customers!
When you hire the wrong person, you’ll likely find yourself looking for ways to reassign the employee or work tirelessly to fit them into the organization in some way. Rather than simply letting the employee go, you’ll owe it to them to spend time and money on training and ongoing performance reviews. Eventually, they may become an adequate employee for the business, but there’s also a better than even chance that they won’t work out.
Either way, they’re a drain on resources. So, the question is, why does this happen in the first place?
The answer to that is not as complex as you may think it would be.
The challenge is that often those subjective elements are harder to assess, evaluate and justify – and with our modern environment of non-discriminatory and equal opportunity hiring procedures, the “Gut feel” that many of these more subjective evaluation criteria contribute to cannot be relied upon.
Providing objectivity around personality assessment is what birthed the personality profiling tools which are now widely used in businesses across the globe – tools like the Apollo Profile, Myers Briggs and DISC, for example. However, these profiling tools only present a partial solution.
What has been missing from the applicant evaluation puzzle has been the ability to overlay whether a candidate is a “Fit” for the culture of the organization – better still, for the area of the organization that the candidate is seeking employment in. When an organization has all of this data – the qualifications and skills of the candidate, their personality profile and their cultural fit – the risk of making poor hiring choices is greatly reduced.
This is why Culture Shaper developed their culture assessment and development tool – it is the missing piece of the hiring puzzle as it provides employers with the ability to map their organization’s cultural environment with the cultural profile of each candidate.
The starting point for Culture Shaper is the “Role Description” which is built on a framework comprising of 43 cultural elements across three segments of Belonging, Performance and Climate – you can find out more about how that works here (link to next article).
Including Culture Shaper as a part of your recruiting and selection is a very affordable way to improve the quality of your workforce and your workplace culture – as well as an excellent way to reduce your hiring “mistakes”!
To experience for yourself what Culture Shaper is capable of, you can try before you buy! Get to understand what you get and how easy it is to deploy and how Culture Shaper’s metrics will assist you to secure those candidates that are not only qualified and experienced but also the right cultural fit for your organisation.
To find out more or to arrange a free trial, CLICK HERE