Break out of the bad hire trap
No matter how well-financed, strategised or marketed a business may be, it’s the people that ultimately influence its level of success. However, hiring the right talent is often far from straight-forward, and so many business owners get it wrong. Making a bad hire doesn’t just mean you have to look for a new candidate to fill the position – in fact, it’s a mistake that can cause a ripple of negative effects across a company.
Comprehensive recruitment software is a vital asset for business owners looking for quality talent, and can go a long way towards helping them improve their hiring success,
Almost 90 per cent of small business owners report making a bad hiring decision.
Poor hiring decisions can be costly
Recruitment can pose a significant challenge for a range of different companies. No matter how big your organisation, if you cannot find the right candidate, you risk impairing not only the function of the role in question, but productivity and cost in general. Monster’s Senior Vice President of Small Business Solutions, Meredith Hanrahan, highlights small businesses in particular to show how common the issue is.
“Small business owners struggle to find the right person for the job, and as a result have made the wrong hiring decision on more than one occasion,” she said.
According to research from career site Monster, released in 2016, 89 per cent of responding small business owners said that they had made a bad hiring decision. Of respondents who believed that this was a risk to their company, 62 per cent said productivity could be lowered by a bad hire, and 68 per cent feared harm to the business’s reputation.
Among companies that had employed the wrong person, 51 per cent experienced an increase in product errors, 69 per cent lost time, 24 per cent lost customers, and 56 per cent made a financial loss.
Where do the problems lie?
While the drawbacks of a bad hire are apparent, what is it that leads a business to make this costly decision? Forbes argues that the biggest cause of a poor hiring decision is compromise, with business owners, forgoing their ideal candidate for someone that’s close enough and available at the time.
This compromise is likely due to time pressure to fill a vacancy, leading to mistakes and shortcuts in the hiring process. It can mean that candidates are not pre-screened, not interviewed thoroughly enough to identify a cultural fit as well as a technical one and not adequately cross checked with references and background research. As a result, the employer hires someone that may not be the perfect person for the role, and while it is time-effective in the short-term, it could do more harm than good in the long run.
Recruitment software streamlines your processes, giving you more time to find the right candidate.
Is recruitment software the solution?
When time is not on your side and efficiency is vital, it’s necessary to look for another way to streamline the hiring process without compromising on candidate quality. Specialised cloud productivity software provides a centralised, accurate platform for managing your hiring process, minimising administration tasks and allowing you to collaborate with customers and clients.
It provides an all-in-one system where you can recruit, pay and bill efficiently, boosting your overall productively. When it comes to find thing the right talent, staff will be able to devote more time to assessing and reviewing candidates because they will have to spend less time filtering through applications.
An investment in a system of this kind means you have the tools to make good hiring decisions with greater ease, and your entire end-to-end process will be more streamlined than ever. As a result, you will have access to the talent that is really going to benefit you in the long term.