Are You Hiring The Right People?

Changing technologies have dramatically disrupted traditional business operations, making many companies along the industrial metals supply chain struggle to find the right talent with the right skills. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this challenge. Even with a well-designed hiring system in place, many companies may still experience a high rate of failure getting the right people on board. Why is this the case? What are the roadblocks?

Before we answer these questions, let’s look at a scenario: A sales rep position opened last month in your company because one of your star salespeople was recruited away by a major competitor in your industry. Your hiring manager and sales manager got together to discuss how to fill this vacancy. With HR’s assistance, a job ad was developed and posted through various social media and job boards.

Luckily, it did not take long to receive a pool of applications. Based on your preset criteria, you conducted an initial screening of the applicants and identified the top three candidates for onsite interviewing. Each candidate took the sales assessment test and went through multiple rounds of interviews with different groups of interviewers. The one candidate who scored the highest in the sales assessment and received the most positive feedback from the interviewers was offered the job.

Your mission was accomplished! However, one year into the job, you found your new hire was not performing at the level expected despite the rigorous nine-month job orientation and sales training they had completed. To help them make improvements, you provided this sales rep with extra training and job coaching. Yet, nothing improved performance, and their job evaluations for the second and third years remained consistently low. Now you wonder: Why did our three-year investment in this new hire not make a difference in their performance? Did we hire the right person in the first place?

If this scenario sounds familiar, consider the following four questions. These questions provide you with the general principles that can guide your hiring practices, rather than giving you specific tactics regarding how to hire.

1. How do we define right? Answers to this question are subject to individual interpretation because what is perceived as right by one company may not be right to another. So, before you start looking for a future employee in the job market, make sure you reach a consensus among your senior executives, hiring managers, division managers and frontline supervisors on the meaning of right. For example, would right mean having a set of competencies required for a specific job? Or, does it mean the candidate shares your corporate values and mission (cultural fit) and has the right attitude or work ethic? Figuring out what matters most to your company and what it takes to succeed in a new position will start you on the right path.
2. What do we look for in a candidate? Often, people are hired for their IQ (knowledge and skills) that will enable them to fulfill their job responsibilities. But many people are fired not because of their IQ, but because of a lack of EQ (emotional intelligence) — the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. While EQ is widely recognized as the key to both personal and professional success, it has been largely ignored by many organizational leaders. Ample research suggests that EQ can be a much more significant predictor for success than IQ when it comes to finding the right employees. So make sure you check the quality of a new hire in terms of both IQ and EQ.
3. Can this position be filled internally? When there is a job vacancy, our first inclination is to look outside of the company. There is a higher cost associated with hiring from outside than promoting from within, and it can take up to three years for external hires to perform as well as internal candidates. So before you look outside to fill a position, look inside first to see if a current employee has the capability or potential to assume the new responsibility. For example, can you place an inside sales rep in an outside sales position? If not, what will it take to make it happen time- and money-wise, compared to hiring from outside?
4. Would I hire the same person again? When it comes to hiring, there is no magic formula for success. The reality is that no matter how hard you try, you may still end up with bad hires. Remember: Most, if not all, candidates are prepared or trained to take hiring tests or to answer interview questions. As a result, you may not get a true picture of the candidates. So if you are thinking of letting a new hire go, take a moment to ask yourself: Would I hire the same person again? This question will prevent you from making an emotional or hasty decision and help you re-evaluate the new hire in a more objective manner. With time, you may find the problem is not that you hired the wrong person, but that you placed that person in the wrong position.

Consider one possible explanation about why we do not always hire the right people in the first place: We have paid far more attention to the time and cost to hire than to the quality of a hire. In an attempt to fill a position quickly — and to minimize the loss of productivity due to a job vacancy — many companies forget that there is likely a bigger cost resulting from a bad hire. So make the time to optimize your current hiring practices!

STAY TUNED! MSCI will host a webinar on Optimizing Talent Acquisition on May 17, 2022, at 10 am CT with Dr. Wang. We hope you can join us! More details will be coming soon and will be available here.

Dr. Jia Wang is a professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on international and national human resource development, organization crisis management, and learning within organizations.