Recruiting is a Skill
Just because you make a hiring mistake, you can’t stop hiring.
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Recruiting great people is extremely difficult. Sourcing candidates, interviewing and then closing the best candidates are all difficult on their own and you need to do all of them well.
At the same time, the stakes are high! Hiring the wrong person costs you both money and time, and often the time is more expensive as you need to start the whole process over. This is especially true of executives where the hiring process can take many months and the impact of a bad executive can be fatal.
As a result, many companies make mistakes in hiring. Unfortunately, many companies repeat their mistakes in hiring. For example, there are plenty of companies who hired a bad VP of Sales, then another and wasted two years and a lot of money on a string of bad executives. In some cases it kills the company.
The most common reaction I hear from companies that have a string of bad hires for a position is to give up. They decide it’s impossible to hire for the position so they just don’t do it. Maybe the CEO takes on the job, or they divide it up among other members of the team. Whatever the solution, it’s avoiding the real problem.
Recruiting is not a task to complete, or a project to manage. Recruiting is a skill that your entire company needs to be good at to succeed, and gaining that skill is not easy! Most companies are bad at recruiting, which means most of your employees have never learned great recruiting skills and likely have never seen recruiting done well. You are starting with a bad hand.
So, the first thing you need to do is reset your baseline. Everyone involved in the recruiting process needs to learn what you are looking for, why it’s important and what you expect from recruiting. They also need to understand how great candidates perceive the company and what they look for! You need to teach them all of these things, never assume they know them.
The second thing you need is a great recruiting process. I have shared mine (see A Better Hiring Process) but there are many you might choose. The key to all of them is that the process is defined before you start hiring, not during the process. A horrible hiring process is one where you can’t tell the candidate at the beginning how the rest of the process will unfold.
A Better Hiring Process
With that process in hand, you need to train your team on how to follow it. Run mock interviews with mock candidates. Make your team practice! It sounds strange to practice interviewing, but there is a reason we practice sports. Practice is the only way to get good, and if you don’t practice there is no way you’re at your best. Remember, most of your team does not know what good recruiting looks like, and practice is one way to show them.
Finally, make sure every team member is certified before they can help with recruiting. You can decide what certified means, but whatever you choose it’s a test of whether they have learned what you taught them. Sometimes it means they do well in mock interviews, in other cases they might tag along for interviews and see how it’s done well. It should be clear that interviewing is a privilege and a skill that they acquire, not something they jump into and just do their best.
When you think about it, it’s crazy to believe that someone can just pick up a task and do it well without training and practice. However, that is how recruiting works at most companies! The reason so many companies are bad at recruiting is that they assume they are already good at it.
Give your company an advantage and focus on getting good at recruiting. Don’t wait for mis-hires or failures to be a wake up call, focus on it right now. If you can get great at recruiting, it’s a competitive advantage.
For more on People and Recruiting, see: