The impact of poor candidate fit
If you're hiring the wrong candidates, because you're not asking the right questions upfront, the impact on your business goes far beyond simply the expense of finding a replacement.
Sifting through a pile of resumes looking for the perfect candidate can be daunting, because we all know you can't judge a book by its cover. While choosing the right applicant is often challenging, what's really daunting is the knowledge that getting it wrong can be an extremely costly mistake.
Don't assume that the cost of replacing a new hire is simply the expense of placing a new and then finding the time to sift through more resumes. The impact of poor candidate fit goes much further, both before and after you part ways.
The true cost of a poor hiring decision
For starters, hiring the wrong candidate can have a major impact on the business as soon as they walk in the door. They'll likely take longer to get up to speed and, even then, the wrong candidate will probably be less productive than you'd hoped, with costly waste and errors.
Failure to meet the KPIs and other expectations laid out in your induction pack is frequently an early sign that you might have a problem on your hands. You need to ask yourself if it's simply a question of training, or if you're dealing with a poor attitude, which is much harder to fix.
Remember, it's not just that person's own disappointing performance which is costing the business, it's also their impact on the people around them. Disruption, frustration, resentment and even personality clashes can drag down the effectiveness and efficiency of your entire team.
If they're in a customer-facing role, a poorly performing new hire could even see you lose business, especially if they have a bad attitude.
Related article: Navigating high turnover in hotels: Retention strategies
In industries like health and aged care, high employee turnover due to poor candidate fit can also have a major impact on continuity of care. The people in your care end up paying part of the price for your bad hiring decisions.
The ripple effect on your team and business
Once you've decided to show your bad hire the door, a drawn-out and expensive separation process can also take its toll on your entire team and damage morale.
After they're finally out the door, that poor hiring choice continues to have an impact on the business.
You need to re-advertise the role, while putting the time and effort into hopefully making a better choice this time. When you do bring in someone new, there'll be retraining costs as well as the productivity hit while they get up to speed.
While they wait for a replacement, your team needs to spend time and effort cleaning up the mess, while also working harder because they're short-handed. All while wondering if they're about to get back on the merry-go-round and go through the whole thing again.
Constant staff turnover and the need to retrain new hires can soon demoralise your people. After a while, even your best workers start looking around for another job, a snowball effect which doubles-down the impact of your initial poor recruitment choices.
If you're lucky, that's the end of it, but sometimes the impact of poor candidate fit and needing to let someone go continues to haunt you for years.
Related article: Improving retention is all about hiring in the right people from the start
Word of mouth and poor reviews from unhappy former employees with an axe to grind can hurt the organisation's reputation. This makes it harder for you to attract the best talent in the future. Remember, you're part of the reason why that former employee is unhappy, because you brought them into a role which was a bad fit for them.
In extreme cases, a disgruntled former employee might engage in stalking or other disruptive behaviour, which takes a serious mental toll on your people and can even require security measures.
The impact of poor candidate fit is clearly extensive, so why do people tend to make bad hiring choices? More often than not, it's because they make the mistake of focusing on skills instead of attitudes.
It's true that you can't judge a book by its cover but, when you're hiring, you don't have to simply go by their CV and cover letter. By asking their right questions upfront, you can look beyond skills and qualifications to gain some real insight into their attitudes, temperament and overall fit for the role and your business as a whole.
How to get hiring right with Expr3ss!
That's where Expr3ss! can help, using short surveys to quickly and cost-effectively pinpoint job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit. This helps you identify the candidates who will perform well and fit in with your team.
The surveys typically take around six minutes, and include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications and certifications before they are recommended for an interview.
Hiring decisions are too important to be left to chance. Rather than flicking through resumes and hoping for the best, you need real insights into applicants to ensure you don't pay the price for poor candidate fit.
