Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue II, 2013 | Page 78
People
By Mel Kleiman
Avoid these Common
Hiring Mistakes
10 ways to hire the wrong person every
time—guaranteed!
I
n my 20-plus years of teaching and
consulting with business owners
and hiring managers about how
to “hire tough so they can manage easy,” I’ve discovered there are 10
commonplace mistakes almost everyone
makes that are guaranteed to result in
bad hiring decisions and waste untold
time, money, and effort. Thank God I’ve
never had a client who’s made all these
mistakes at once, but it really only takes
two or three to sabotage your efforts to
hire great people. Are you guilty of any
of the following?
1. Going grocery shopping without
a list. When you don’t have a list, you
buy things you don’t need and forget
some of the things you do. Then you
have to go back to the store. The same
is true in hiring. Many employers recruit
applicants with no clear picture of the
specific mental and physical capacities,
attitudes, personality traits, and skills
needed to be successful on the job. When
they discover the person they hired with
all the right skills also has an attitude
problem, they have to go “back to the
store” again. (This mistake is a major
cause of employee turnover.)
2. Using the “post and pray” technique. You need someone now so you
post a job or run an ad or put a “Now
Hiring” sign on the marquee and pray
someone who can start tomorrow will
respond.
3. Fishing in the wrong pond. Your
recruiting ads attract people who are
looking for a job—any job—rather than
all the great people who are already employed and looking for a better job. You
don’t ask your employees, vendors, business networks, family, and friends if they
know of anyone who would be a good fit
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Multi-Unit Franchisee Is s ue II, 2013
for the job. (Referrals are the number-one
best source of new employees.)
4. Making it difficult to get into your
hiring system. Most of the best people
have jobs and don’t have time to fill out
a lengthy application or update their resume on the chance they may be invited
to interview. You also exclude many excellent candidates by having unreasonable
requirements. Is a high school diploma
or a college degree really necessary? If
you only want to hire someone with five
or more years of experience, will you get
that… or will you be getting one year of
experience five times over?
5. Relying on gut instinct. If you
“like” an applicant, you look for reasons
to hire them; and if you don’t like them,
you look for reasons not to hire them. This
way you get to be right (but you also often
don’t hire the right person for the job).
6. Failing to use tools. You don’t prescreen applicants by phone to ensure they
meet your minimum hiring requirements
(reliable transportation, willing to work
the hours needed for what you are willing to pay, etc.). You don’t test them for
the needed capacities, attitudes, personality traits, and skills. Skipping the use of
these tools is a guaranteed way to spend
wasted time in interviews with unsuitable applicants.
7. Failing to plan for the interview. (1)
You haven’t reviewed the documents and
test results collected to date, or planned
what questions to ask. So you just start
talking about what you do know, i.e., what
the right person for the job will be able to
do and how they’ll do it. Then the applicant uses this information to answer your
quest ions in just the right way. (2) You
interview off the resume or application.
Don’t you realize that when you do this
you’re just asking the applicant to confirm
the information they’ve already provided
and what they’ve provided is only what
they want you to know?
8. Not asking the tough questions.
Hey, the applicant is clean-cut and pleasant so you assume you don’t have to ask
about criminal activities, drug use, values, past performance, and dependability.
9. Not having a unique hiring
proposition. Do you know the top 10
reasons your clients do business with
you? Well, you need to know at least
five compelling reasons someone should
want to work for you. Great pay? Flexible schedules? Family friendly? While
you’re looking for a great person, great
people are looking for a great employer,
so you need to sell them on the job and
your organization.
10. Not checking references. You
just assume that none of these people
will tell you anything useful. A failure to
check references, no matter what you do
or don’t learn, leaves you wide open for
a negligent hiring lawsuit.
I hope you’ve been doing a mental selfaudit of your own hiring practices as you
read through this compendium of common missteps. If you found yourself not
guilty on any of these counts, congratulations, you’re one of the few. If you found
yourself guilty on two or more counts,
what you will have to do to remedy the
situation will be far less costly and timeconsuming than yet another bad hire.
Mel Kleiman is a speaker,
consultant, and author on
strategies for hiring and retaining the best hourly employees and their managers.
He is one of only 650 speakers worldwide to have earned the Certified
Speaking Professional designation and is
president of Humetrics, a leading developer of
systems and tools for recruiting, selection, and
retention. He has written five books, including
The 5 Firsts: A Simple System To Onboard
and Engage Top Talent, and he publishes a
regular blog. Find him at 713-771-4401 or
at [email protected], www.Humetrics.com, and www.KleimanHR.com.