Your company’s growing rapidly. You need to find someone to help out ASAP, so you conduct a quick round of interviews. You’re not in love with any of the candidates but you feel pressure to hire someone now to take the load off of your staff. What ends up happening? You hire one of those candidates you don’t love. You settle. And it could cost you more than you bargained for.
Career Builder recently surveyed 2,696 hiring managers and human resource professionals to find out more about bad hires – why companies hire subpar employees, how much it actually costs a business and characteristics of less-than-desirable workers.
Why Companies Make Bad Hires
Let’s start with why companies make poor hiring choices. According to the survey, 38% of companies hire bad employees because the business needed to fill a position quickly. Following closely behind that is the 34% of respondents that attributed the bad hire to a mistake. Twenty-one percent of HR professionals indicated that they didn’t gather enough intelligence about the employee’s skill set.
I’m sure none of these answers surprise you, so let’s move on to the really interesting information that will make you think twice when you’re tempted to hire a subpar candidate.
What Does A Bad Hire Cost?
Due to a bad hire, 41% of companies lost worker productivity, 40% lost time due to recruiting and training another worker, and 37% lost expense recruiting and training another worker. Thirty-six percent said that bad employees also had negative impact on employee morale, and 22% revealed that poor hires had a negative impact on client solutions.
Beyond that, almost half of the respondents, 41%, said that a bad hiring decision in the last year cost them at least $25,000. Twenty-five percent of companies surveyed said that hiring the wrong person cost them at least $50,000 in the last year.
Those numbers underscore how important it is to make good hiring decisions – they directly affect your company’s bottom line.
How To Prevent A Bad Hire
Luckily, the chances of making a poor hiring decision can decrease if you take a few precautions.
Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, has some tips for preventing bad hires.
- Vet candidates as thoroughly as possible.
- Introduce candidates to as many people in the department where they’ll be working as possible, especially if they will be working closely together.
- If a particular skill or program knowledge is required for the job, ask for samples of past work or even ask them to perform a test if the skill or program required is crucial for the job.
Small business expert Jay Goltz provides tips as well.
- Conduct great interviews.
- Always check ALL references.
- Give your employee a great first day on the job. This makes them confident in their decision to accept your job offer.
If you’re more of a visual person, I’ve included a nice infographic summarizing the Career Builder survey results that Mindflash put together.
Click here to see the enlarged version.
