Are you making these hiring mistakes?

By Fred Matulka

As managers, your best workers require little of your time, while your struggling or poor performers take most of your time. It’s as if you are herding cats, which is senseless. That’s why hiring the right person is crucial for a company to be successful.

Hiring the best or hiring the right person is an extremely difficult responsibility. Even some of the best leaders — Jack Welch and Bill Gates, to name a couple — have wrestled with this problem. One of the major reasons cited is that “talent goes downhill.” Another way of saying this is if the scale is 1 to 10, with 10 being the top performers, an 8 will hire a 5, 6, or 7 but never a 9 or 10. Inferior people work for superior people, which is simply how it always works out. A second powerful reason is that the benchmark we use to measure and assess others is ourselves, which opens the whole process to vast amounts of subjectivity. Companies must hire as many 10s as possible — people who are the best at what they do in their respective positions.

Businesses usually don’t expense out on a balance sheet how much hiring the wrong person costs, but the stakes, as you well know, are very high. The industry rule of thumb is about three times the person’s annual salary. This figure does not include opportunity cost, business lost, customers lost and momentum.

Most companies experience extreme difficulty in hiring the right people because of three common mistakes:

1. They hire people for what they know and fire them for who they are.
2. They hire too quickly and fire too slowly.
3. They base their hiring decision on previous experience.

See more in Matulka’s 2013 Annual Meeting presentation “The stronger your team, the more successful your company”

Matulka is a consultant for the Culture Index Program, which is used to recognize the talents and traits of people, maximize those talents and match them to teams to ensure their success.