Afraid of repeating past hiring mistakes? You’re not alone
“Am I the problem?”
That’s the uncomfortable question ‘Sonia,’ the owner of a creative agency, asked me during a conversation about her employee, ‘Carrie.’
Carrie was a newer hire who demonstrated charisma and creativity but was also showing a pattern of mistakes and missed deadlines. This might have been manageable, but Sonia hired Carrie to manage her firm's clients, and too many balls had been dropped already.
Sonia knew she had to replace Carrie, but she was nervous, because Carrie passed her interview and screening with flying colors.
Sonia wanted to figure out what the issue was before she brought someone else on.
I love working with CEOs like Sonia, who are willing to look at the role their own behaviors play in team performance.
Everything from how you frame assignments to how moody you allow yourself to be at work can have an effect on the team's ability to do their jobs well.
That's why it's important to look at your own role in a bad hire.
But this isn’t usually where I start digging around.
People problems are nearly always system failures.
As we talked about her hiring system, it became obvious that Sonia did an amazing job screening for creativity, charisma and presentation skills – all important to the role.
But when I asked Sonia how she tested for project management qualities, I found out that she hadn't tested her candidates on attention to detail or meeting deadlines.
The system wasn't complete.
We were able to figure this out, because Sonia was open to the idea that Carrie's unsuitability to the role wasn't just a Carrie problem.
Whether or not Carrie intentionally overstated her abilities is irrelevant, because you can't control for that sort of thing.
That's why your hiring system should be designed to give you the most important information about your candidates.
When you make a bad hire, channel your frustration into determining how you can improve your system, so you don't repeat the same mistake next time.
Similarly, please please don't let one or two bad hires teach you that you can't get support. This is simply information telling you that something in your screening, onboarding or management style that needs your attention.
All these things take a little time and training to learn how to implement well, but on the other side is the growth and freedom you're after.
If you need to be sure your candidate will never miss a deadline or have exacting attention to detail, testing for these behaviors during the interview process is the best way to figure out how they’ll perform on the job.
It’s become popular to embed little tests into your application, but I don’t love that approach.
Candidates are very careful at that stage, and these extra hoops up front don’t give you a good sense of how they’ll perform on a day-to-day basis.
Instead, I prefer to weave tests throughout the process.
At Podcast Ally, I never wanted to have to micromanage the team to be sure they were on top of their responsibilities. So, when I gave candidates their writing assessment, I wrote, "I understood you have other obligations, so I’d like you to look it over and let me know when you'll be able to send it back."
Their behavior here told me a few important things:
Could the candidate accurately assess the time it would take them to complete a project?
Would they stick to their own deadline?
If the candidate missed their deadline, they were removed from consideration.
In two and a half years, only one candidate ever made it through that test and didn’t live up to our standards.
She ended up being one of those bad apples, who presented incredibly well during the hiring process and then immediately fell apart.
Not every experience is a lesson you need to learn – I let her go.
Other than her, every single team member I hired met every single deadline.
The system did its job.
Sonia is off working on her hiring system, and I’ll have an update next year.
But for now, I’d like to invite you to reflect on your past hiring experiences:
Is your screening system doing its job?
No system is going to give you perfect results – we’re human, after all, and not machines!
But if you’ve made some hiring mistakes that you’d like to avoid in the future, try this:
For the specific role you’re looking at, come up with the 2-3 most important behaviors that you would want to screen for.
Audit your hiring process. Are you screening for each of these behaviors? If you're having a hard time coming up with ideas on how to test the behaviors or narrowing in on what you could test for, schedule some time to chat with me. I’d be happy to help!
For anything that’s missing, add 1-2 screening steps. I recommend testing for each of your most important behaviors in two different ways, because that gives you more insight into how your candidate will perform in the role itself. Most of us can follow directions in an application, but can you maintain that through a process?
And if you haven’t hired yet but intend to in the next year, save this post for yourself, so you can avoid some costly mistakes the first time!