The Top 10 Tips for Avoiding Bad Hires

Your job posting was a success and you’ve got a stack of promising resumes. How do you ensure you’re choosing the best new hires for your practice? Remember you're looking for fit and affinity. This takes time. 

"Research shows that top performing practices are willing to recruit, interview, hire, and train new team members until they found the perfect fit! The number one reason businesses make bad hiring decisions is because they are more concerned with hiring quickly than well." [1] 

Top 10 Tips to Avoid Bad Hires 

1. Don’t rush it. When hiring is urgent and immediate, you cut corners in a lot of ways. Firstly, you don’t give yourself enough time to prepare the job description or the interview questions, both of which are invaluable tools to filter out the wrong candidates. Secondly, you won’t have enough time to do thorough background and reference checks. 

2. Have an open mind. Every open position has an “ideal candidate” profile, but you’ll miss out on some potentially great candidates if you follow that profile too strictly. While it’s good to have an idea of the skills and personality traits that you want to see in a hire, looking only for those candidates while discarding those who don’t fit the profile perfectly is a surefire way to limit your options. 

3. Check your biases at the door. The workforce is more inclusive and diverse than ever before. But there are still hiring managers and recruiters who have subconscious, unchecked internal biases that may result in poor hiring decisions. 

4. Don’t get swept away by a good interview. When it comes to hiring, a candidate who is articulate, fun, interesting and friendly is more likely to get the job, regardless of actual skill or experience. It’s easier to overlook red flags if you’re already impressed, even if it’s just with one major aspect of their character. 

5. Don’t emphasize experience over fit. It’s important for a candidate to have the right technical skills for the job, but skills don’t make a good employee—attitude and work ethic do. One of the biggest mistakes a hiring manager can make is hiring someone solely on their experience, without taking into consideration how well they align with your company values. You can often train someone to be more technically proficient, but it’s so much harder to turn someone into an effective team player. 

6. Be clear in your job description. To get you the best candidates possible, the job description needs to be clear and complete— otherwise, you are wasting both your and the candidates’ time. Determine the skills and requirements that your ideal candidate for that specific position would have. This includes technical skills, soft skills and personality traits.

7. Attract higher-quality candidates. If your ideal candidates don’t know about the job opening, you’ll only get bad hires or wrong fits for your team. Cast as wide a net as possible:  

8. Look at technical and soft skills. Even in industries where technical skill is paramount, it’s still not the best idea to hire someone based on their talent and technical skill alone.  

9. Put them through a trial period. If a candidate seems like a good fit but you’re not entirely convinced yet, consider giving them a probationary period or asking them to complete a one-off project first.  

10. Don’t rush the interview process. Unless you absolutely must fill a position now, slow and steady will help you to win at hiring. When you rush interviewing, you tend to overlook huge red flags. Slow down, pay attention and look out for the following signs that a person is a bad hire. 

[1]     Dentrix Profitability Coaching, How to Avoid a Bad Hire.