Top Five Mistakes Made When Hiring or Promoting

The most common mistake organizations make when hiring or promoting managers and executives is failing to define and assess those roles most crucial to successful performance, according to a survey by Right Management.

The most common mistakes organizations make in hiring and promoting managers and executives are:

• 43% - Inadequately defining and evaluating roles critical to successful performance
• 41% - Insufficient grooming of high-potential employees (i.e. coaching, mentoring and training)
• 29% - Using overly subjective criteria
• 27% - Too much focus on managerial and interpersonal skills - and not enough emphasis on less apparent talents, such as morale or team building
• 20% - Giving inadequate consideration to people from outside the organization

Lower employee morale and decreased productivity are the biggest consequences of bad hiring and promotion decisions. Other negative consequences of bad hires and promotions include: lost customers and market share, and higher training, recruitment and severance costs, according to the survey.

Here is an interesting fact that a colleague of mine, John W. Howard, Ph.D., collected from SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management):

• More than half of applicants lie or exaggerate in applications and resumes! (We don’t know which part is lies!)

What do most employers do to try to improve this flawed information? We check references. (Unfortunately, reference checking is prone to all of the flawed information of applications, hard to obtain, and time-consuming.) To complete the information-gathering, we use that time-honored tool of the hiring process, the interview.

So what does an interview get us? More scary statistics...

• 63% of all hiring decisions are reached in less than 5 minutes of interview time. The next 25 minutes we spend does not change or improve this decision.
• Interviewers have less than a 15% chance of identifying lies from application information
  in an interview.
• Interviews predict job success only 14% of the time.
• As much as we try not to, demographic variables such as age, race, or gender influence interviewer judgments.

How can we overcome the multiple challenges described? Introduce as much good, accurate, reliable, valid information into the process as you can. Use valid, reliable, legally defensible assessments. Assessments may include behavioral assessment tools, workplace simulations, situational judgment, cognitive ability testing, etc.

When we have access to reliable, subject information in the hiring and promoting process, we also gain the following benefits:

• Turnover goes down!
• Cost of the hiring process diminishes!
• More hires become “Top Performers”!
• Most importantly, profits increase!

Seems like a good place to start!

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Shannon Lear Martin is the President of Austin, Texas based TrainUtopia (http://www.trainutopia.com) and has been helping companies improve their organizational performance to meet their business goals. She is also considered an expert in training effectiveness measurement. Shannon publishes a monthly newsletter “Training News You Can Use” , which is jammed with resources, articles and tips on performance improvement, training and development. She can be reached at smartin@trainutopia.com.