How Not to Hire

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Team

Emily Kumler

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400219698
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This helpful resource will show you what you're doing wrong with hiring and how to fix it.

It's frustrating. You're up to date on all the newest interview techniques. You know what to look for on candidates' résumés. You inspect social media profiles for red flags and put them through an in-depth panel interview. They pass with flying colors.

It's the same cycle: you diligently sort through résumés to find the cream of the crop. You have amazing interviews and confidently land on the one, but two weeks into the job and the one turns out to be the wrong one. What gives? Well, you're clearly screwing something up, and it's time to find out what it is.

How Not to Hire is filled with interviews and stories of people who were being held back by the things they didn't realize were working against them. The workplace is a minefield filled with politics and unspoken rules. This book is here to teach you:

• How you're screwing it up and what to do about it
• How other people screwed it up before figuring it out
• What you should stop doing immediately
• What you should be doing more of

Now, stop panicking and letting frustration hold you back. How Not to Hire is the tool you need to get the best candidates for the interview and the right person for the job!

Section 1

The Search

Hiring is a little like dating, you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Just like the hunt for a mate, the best way to screw things up is to be disingenuous about your needs and their interests. Once upon a time, I stumbled upon a close friend’s online dating profile. She was gorgeous, brilliant, and tons of fun. But she was not the avid football fan that she claimed to be—it’s probably safe to say anyone who calls themselves an avid football fan is likely not. Nor was she any good at flip cup. Her profile was filled with things she was not. It was clear she was describing what she thought guys would want: a beer-guzzling, football-loving, hot chick, but this begs the question: What would happen when they found out who she actually was, an art-loving homebody who hated beer?

The same phenomenon happens with hiring. We all want to connect and like each other, and sometimes that means we’re not 100 percent honest about what we’re looking for or what we’re offering. But, you actually need to be brutally honest about what you need in the role you’re hiring for or you will end up with a candidate who doesn’t work out. You must know your organization’s culture, structure, and its needs before you can bring on an all-star that will be the perfect fit for your business.

You actually need to be brutally honest about what

you need in the role you’re hiring for or you will end

up with a candidate who doesn’t work out. You must

know your organization’s culture, structure, and its

needs before you can bring on an all-star that will be

the perfect fit for your business.

Making a hiring decision is a big investment. Significant time and capital go into training new employees and it is all a big waste if you pull a bait-and-switch because when they learn what you’re really all about, they’ll be looking for another job and you’ll be looking for their replacement. Or worse still, you bring on someone you’re impressed by who doesn’t have any of the necessary skills and you reveal your own shortcomings as a manager.

Defining your search is the key to your success. If my friend had described her love for travel, art, and literature, she might have met her match much sooner. If you need an admin, but you list the position as creative director, you too will have a drawn-out, more frustrating experience.

Think about what responsibilities your hire will have, then ask yourself what kinds of people tend to be good at those sorts of tasks and who tends to be bad at them.

Reverse engineer the hiring process starting with what you don’t want. Asking yourself who would be terrible in the role is an incredibly valuable exercise that hardly anyone does. Consider the inverse: what you don’t want. It might help you eliminate candidates earlier in your process, saving you time and advancing your quest for the right person.

If you need someone to manage your calendar, pick up your dry cleaning, do background research for upcoming client meetings, and file your bills, you’re not looking for someone who shows up late or too early to the interview. If anyone walks in with a disheveled suit, send ’em packing. You need to trust that the hire is responsible, organized, and a Type-A, detail-oriented machine. If they don’t own an iron, they might not be your best option. Likewise, someone who has spent the last three summers in Europe might not be down for your two-weeks-per-year vacation policy. These are important factors for long-term success in the position and within the company.

Imagine someone you know who would be perfect for the job and make a list of the qualities that made them come to mind, then look for others with those characteristics.

When you’re hiring on behalf of someone else, it is essential to understand how the role and ideal candidate looks in the eyes of that specific boss. Get the details right from the beginning, and you’ll be able to search for those specifics. Ask lots of questions. Maybe even spend a day shadowing someone who’s currently kicking butt in that role. The more you know about what’s required to be successful in the position, the more likely you’ll be able to match it to someone who will thrive.

When you’re hiring on behalf of someone else,

it is essential to understand how the role and ideal

candidate looks in the eyes of that specific boss.

Get the details right from the beginning, and you’ll

be able to search for those specifics. Ask lots of

questions. Maybe even spend a day shadowing

someone who’s currently kicking butt in that role.

A lot like a reporter trying to get the story, you’re looking to get to know people in a short period of time, which is made more difficult by laws and practices that prevent you from asking many questions. For example, you may know the role is intense, and when employees miss work, it is especially detrimental to the whole team, but you cannot ask if they’ve missed a lot of work in the past or any questions about their health. So instead of asking questions, I recommend setting clear expectations like: This is a super intense position, members of the team rarely call in sick and most schedule vacations around project breaks. This is something you should consider, as it’s not the lifestyle everyone wants. This gives the candidate a chance to think honestly about the commitments required to perform in the position. It is always better to have someone back out of the application because they realize they cannot perform in the job than it is to hire them and be faced with having to fire them for underperforming. Saving that time and getting to the heart of it saves money and productivity down the line.

You are tasked with gaining keen insights in an extremely short period of time to make an important decision with a limited data set. Listening carefully and following up properly will help you immensely. Finding areas to expand upon in the interview, with references, and even when the candidate is first hired is essential to successfully hiring the right people for the right jobs.

One of the most common mistakes people fall into in hiring is the modern idea that a candidate for a job must already have the skills required to do the job. Relying on algorithms to search for candidates with specific skills is a recent phenomenon that greatly limits the talent pool. Until recently, we looked for people with an interest and the ability to learn. If you find someone who doesn’t yet know how to do the job, but who really wants to learn, they may become one of your best workers because you’ve given them an opportunity that allows them to grow. Most people want jobs that are fulfilling in some way. Hiring someone who already knows everything about the job may seem great, but it may also mean that the new employee is bored and looking for another job sooner than you may want.

If your search is flawed, then your hiring will be off. Consider who you’re looking for, what the candidates are looking for, and the skills they need versus the ones you can teach them. Search in an open and honest way, and you’ll be way ahead of the pack.

ONE

Only Look for Candidates Who Already Have the Skills Needed to Perform the Job

Technology companies used to train their employees to do the work the company needed, rather than hiring people who already had the skills to do the work. Today, we’ve shifted to a hiring environment that looks exclusively for people with the right skills. In much the same way that algorithms present problems because their parameters are limited to the data sets that they’re trained on, so too are we entrenched in a hiring modality that prioritizes skills over abilities.

In 2016, Byron Auguste, the co-founder and president of Opportunity@Work, told a group at an MIT conference how an inclusive employment approach changed the course of his family’s life. I was in the audience and realized our country’s hiring problem is almost philosophical. As he explained, at our core we’ve changed from a landscape that taught workers the skills they needed, to one that expects workers to show up already trained, and then we complain when we can’t find qualified people to hire.

Auguste’s personal story was indicative of the 1970s when tech companies were eager to grow, but very few people knew how to work with computers. He told us his father answered an advertisement in the newspaper calling for anyone interested in learning COBOL, a computer programing language, to attend a workshop. The government, working with IBM, was offering a paid training program for anyone willing to develop this new skill. His father signed up, learned the language, loved it, and was soon employed by IBM, changing his family’s future forever.

His talk focused on how today there are thousands of people in inner cities and throughout the Rust Belt that could easily learn to code—filling a much-needed void in the market. Training Americans, just like his father, would help disenfranchised workers achieve upward mobility in the workplace. It would also allow tech companies to build their talent pools.

There has been a lot of talk about American jobs going overseas, that international trade deals have negatively impacted the job market, but this only looks at the issue as an exclusive perspective rather than considering an inclusive approach. What if the labor problems in the United States are due to a lack of training for the jobs that are in demand rather than a lack of overall jobs?

We tend to forget that labor markets are at their essence just markets. They follow the same rules of supply and demand as any other market. Why do we spend so much money screening out the people who do not have the qualities we desire rather than spending that same money on training people to have the skills we need? We have loads of people out of work who once handled the demands of the manufacturing sector. Now that those jobs are mostly automated by machines, we no longe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Special Dedication
• Introduction
• Section 1: The Search
• Section 2: The Interview
• Section 3: The Hire
• Notes
• Acknowledgments