What percentage of your time do you spend on managing existing staff’s problematic performance and issues of existing staff? How many of your current staff would you rehire?

If your answers to these questions is “a considerable amount of time managing existing staff issues” and not “I would rehire 100% of my staff”, then you have made costly hiring mistakes. 

The cost of a bad hire is believed to be between two and nine times the employee’s total remuneration package – that is probably more than some of your planned capital expenditure this year!  Can you afford to spend that amount of money?

So how can you avoid making hiring mistakes and enjoy your staff, team and their success?  You need to know what the most common mistakes are.  Here is my list, and some tips on how to avoid the pitfall:

• Not having an adequate job description. Do you know exactly what the candidate will have to do in their role, so you can interview them and see if they can do it?
• Conducting a poor interview that does not challenge the candidate or verify their claims. Do you make it too easy for them to ‘get through’?  Remember, many people perform well in interviews so make sure you hire the best person for the job, not the best actor.  It may help to devise a test that reflects the situation they’ll be dealing with.
• Putting in place inappropriate prerequisites too early in the process. In the current market, you must be open-minded about a candidate’s history and enforce fewer ‘must haves’ when looking for potential talent.
• Being too subjective and allowing first impressions to have too much weight in your hiring decision. Don’t let your gut feel overrule logic and remember, successful people come in all sorts of ‘packages’.
• Having a bias against the candidate’s previous place of work or the role they held when you worked with them before.  Remember people grow and change and not everyone who works for Company X will be below standard just because you knew someone who was.
• Not knowing how to interview due to lack of training and experience, which often mean’s your don’t have the skills to identify the right person when they are in front of you. If this is the case, don’t be embarrassed, no-one was born being able to interview. We all had to learn how to do it. Ask for some training.
• Not being able to read the ‘signs’ of what motivates a candidate and whether your role or culture will bring the best out of them.  Understanding the things that motivates different generations of people will help you get a return on your hiring investment.
• Being so desperate in the current talent-short market you decide anyone will do.

If you can avoid these obvious mistakes, and also recognise in the current market you need to hire on potential and develop your staff you will be one step ahead of your competitors when it comes to employing good talent. And that’s half the battle.

Lisa Norris is Aquent’s regional director, Australia and New Zealand.