Article: 3 hiring mistakes that can be fatal for a company

Talent Acquisition

3 hiring mistakes that can be fatal for a company

A few mistakes may turn out to be fatal for a company's hiring decisions
3 hiring mistakes that can be fatal for a company
 

To make the right hiring decision, it is important to avoid three common mistakes while assessing a candidate during the interview

 

A few mistakes may turn out to be fatal for a company’s hiring decisions

A Dec 2012 study released by the job site, CareerBuilders, indicated that 69 per cent companies had been negatively affected by a wrong hire in the last year. Bad hiring decisions are a waste of time and effort. Equally worrying is the cost factor attached to it. To make the right hiring decision, it is important to avoid three common mistakes while assessing a candidate during the interview.
1. Prioritizing experience over relevant job skills
Usually managers assess candidates on the basis of their relevant experience. The approach rather should be to analyze a candidate on the basis of critical skills required for the job. Ketan Kapoor, CEO of online assessment platform Mettl says, “Measuring skills as opposed to knowledge is imperative for the right hiring. It is important to focus more on the skills that the job demands.” Assessing candidates on the basis of such quantifiable parameters helps differentiate between a ‘good’ candidate and a ‘suitable’ candidate. It is like assessing people to the success profile of the job in question. Essentially, these should be the critical job skills required for a person to be successful in that job. The best candidate would be the person who brings most of these skills to the workplace.

2. Giving less weightage to behavioral skills
When assessing a candidate, personality analysis and culture fit tests are a few things that recruiters usually focus on. Analysis of behavioral skills and a candidate’s personality doesn't get much focus unless a candidate is miserably bad on these two fronts. Amogh Deshmukh, Head, Sales and Marketing with assessment firm DDI, believes that a candidate’s behavioral skills and personality should be analyzed as carefully as his experience. He says, “When hiring a candidate, it is his knowledge and experience that recruiters mainly focus on. While it is the behavioral competencies and personality factors for which a person is fired from an organization.” A candidate’s job experience, relevant education and such things do play a role in the value he brings to the organization; it is the behavioral skills that turn out to be a game changer.

3. Hiring the best talent for a mundane job
Usually the recruiters are biased towards hiring the ‘most talented’ candidate. However, the temptation to hire a candidate because he is too good to let go may not always result into the right decision. A candidate with some edge over his peers looks to be a lucrative hire, but it doesn't mean that he would turn out to be a star performer in every job profile. Such hiring usually result in a dilemma leaving the recruiter puzzled over what to do with the candidate later on. What needs to be understood is that even the best of performers fail to perform when assigned the wrong task.
What needs to be understood is that hiring isn’t about recruiting a highly talented person; it is about hiring a person whose talent could be utilized by the company.

 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition

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