3 Common Reasons We Recruit The Wrong People

18 Jul 2023

We all have to be very careful when recruiting that we hire staff suitable for the job and the company. Sometimes, we make mistakes, and here are 3 of the common reasons why:

Recruiting in your own image

This can take so many forms – not necessarily that someone looks like you, but generally that the candidate shares many of your attributes such as your sense of humour, style, background, work ethic, qualifications and so on.

Having commonality can help you feel a certain affinity with someone which encourages you to be drawn to them in a positive way, and potentially overlook the important selection criteria, i.e. the ability to do the job.

It can be easy to find yourself relating hard to a candidate for a job and many people who are a little older will have seen someone rising through the ranks who reminds them of themself in some kind of nostalgic way. This leads to the temptation to take them under your wing and voila, a bad decision has been made.

Picking the best of a bad bunch

It sometimes happens that you advertise a job, receive 50 CVs, interview 6 candidates, and feel like you have to appoint someone, even if you know in your heart there’s nobody suitable for the job. You’re in a rush to appoint, need to get your team back to full strength, and have no time to advertise again. Our advice – if there is nobody suitable for the job, then decide whether:

With some intensive training, one of the candidates could do a great job (quickly), or

You could adapt the job in a way which doesn’t affect team productively, and allows you to select someone who is suitable to do the revised job, or

You advertise again, reflecting first on whether the previous advert needs some changes to increase your chances of finding someone suitable

You’re just a bad interviewer

Sometimes, there’s no getting round it – when it comes to interviewing, you forget some of the main principles you’re supposed to stick to, which can include:

You interview alone, so have no second or third opinion to rely on

You accept a candidate’s answers without asking any probing questions to test subject knowledge, judgement or analytical skills, so have no real idea whether they have the depth of skills and knowledge you need

You have not prepared at all for the interviews, so each candidate you meet is asked different questions, different skills are tested, and you can’t objectively compare them, so instead you plump for the one you think you’d get along with best.

Our advice for all interviewers – make sure you are trained! Making a poor appointment can cost you money – wasted time on recruiting, training, loss of custom, managing poor performance, dismissal and then recruiting all over again! Even if you’re in a rush to appoint, there is no point bringing someone into the business that could actually set you back rather than help you move forward.