Today’s post will discuss a matter that is central to everything Morton Consulting does – making the right hire. Actually, it’s not so much about the right hire as it is the pitfalls of hiring the wrong person for a position. A survey was recently released concerning whether and why placements didn’t work out for various tech companies. TechRepublic does a good job of listing out some of the quotes and conclusions from the professionals who responded. They highlight some of the costs and causes of making a bad hire.
A bad hire can have ripple effects throughout a business. For one, there is the time spent training someone who will ultimately (hopefully!) not remain with the company. Then there is the potential lack of productivity from the bad hire themselves and/or from distraction to other employees. This is tied closely to the moral of employees – something that can be seriously hindered by the wrong placement. Another less frequently reported but potentially devastating effect is a negative impact on client relations – something no IT business can afford to happen regularly.
The most frequent trait showed by bad hires in the survey was a bad personnel fit – or someone who doesn’t work well with others at the business. Just a hair behind was the quality of work being less than satisfactory. Customer complaints, deadline issues, and attendance all ranked among the top culprits for why a hire was unsatisfactory.
Why do we make these mistakes? Sometimes things simply don’t work out. Now and then a hire will show up as a completely different person than they seemed in an interview. But more often than not, it is a result of a rushed filling of a critical position. Not spending enough time on character, lack of personal interviews, poor recruitment practices, and a hundred other oversights can conspire against even the best-intentioned searches.
And of course, that’s where Morton Consulting comes in! We’re about giving companies the ability to find the right hire – not just someone who “might fit.” It’s precisely because it’s such an involved process to find and process potential candidates that we can be of such benefit – we put all out resources into searching, interviewing, reviewing, and placing candidates so our clients can stay focused on progress.