Yahoo Finance What do you do when you’ve hired the wrong person?
Have you ever worked with someone that didn’t seem right for the job? Or hired someone that turned out to be the wrong fit? It’s more common than you’d think.
In fact, almost all – a whopping 99 per cent – of Aussie hiring managers have picked a candidate that didn’t end up meeting expectations, according to research by recruitment agency Robert Half.
And it’s the rest of the company’s staff that pay for it.
So what can we do about it?
Hiring managers who realise they’ve made the wrong hire are faced with two decisions: to keep them or to let them go.
The first instinct might be to let them go, but hold your fire on this, advised recruitment agency Robert Half Australia director, Andrew Brushfield.
“It should actually be considered as the last option in order to keep the costs and losses already incurred as low as possible,” he told Yahoo Finance.
“Offering additional support, spending more time on the onboarding process or assigning a new or different role are more viable options that should be considered first.”
Robert Half research showed that nearly half of hiring managers (44 per cent) developed a training program to help the candidate upskill, 39 per cent let the employee go, and 36 per cent partnered with a recruitment agency to find a replacement.
What are the consequences of keeping a wrong hire?
The price of hiring the wrong person can be costly for any business – not just through lost productivity and increasing workloads for existing staff, but also from having to invest in more training or potentially from having to start the recruitment process from scratch if the employer decides to terminate their employment.
“If constructive coaching and HR intervention fails, you might suffer the loss of customers, office productivity and damage to staff morale,” Brushfield pointed out.
But according to the research, the cost of a bad hire can’t always be quantifiable either, with other staff experiencing loss of productivity (43 per cent), higher levels of mental stress (41 per cent), and greater workloads (50 per cent).
“Consider the expense and hassle you face when you have to cut your losses and dismiss this wrong hire,” Brushfield said.
“In the long run, it’s more difficult for the manager and team to accommodate a poor performer than it is to invest in an effective candidate evaluation process.”
Getting it right the first time
It can be challenging to determine a candidate’s suitability, as factors such as cultural fit, attitude, qualifications and experience, all need to be checked and verified in order to ensure they’re the right person for the job.
But an experienced hiring manager should be able to get around this by asking the right questions, testing key skills, and checking references thoroughly.
“These decisions inevitably impact the company financially and cause significant disruption and stress to the existing workforce,” Brushfield said.
So it’s “critical” to get it right the first time, at the very beginning of the hiring process.
“The wisest hiring managers put in the time and effort on the front end to make sure they have the best available pool of applicants for every job opening. And they determine whether they have good procedures in place for evaluating candidates before they even get started,” Brushfield concluded.
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