I’m of the sincerest hope that you’re performing admirable due diligence on all your candidates, conducting back channel references, having them meet with several members of the team and completing take-home assignments. Even when you’ve successfully given a candidate’s background the whole nine yards, for whatever reason sometimes candidates just don’t work out. We’ve all been there. The dreaded bad hire.
It’s not your fault, Recruiters. Well, not entirely your fault, anyway. The good news here is that there’s a lesson to be learned, not just about candidate assessment, but about your team, the specific role, and your onboarding process.
Back to the Interview Process
Once you’ve got clear details about why exactly the hire didn’t work out, it’s time to work backwards and look for areas in your assessment process where the problem could have come up. Was it an area you glazed over in the interview? Did you not surface it with an unlisted reference? Head over to your ATS and look through the notes your team left after their interviews. Something you didn’t find consequential during the assessment stage might have new meaning given your newly found 20/20 hindsight.
Understanding the Role
Bad hires are also an opportunity to learn more about the specific role. This should carry weight all the way back to your initial sourcing and phone screening, as you should now have a more accurate outline of the position and can eliminate people like your bad hire from the process. You can make this clear by meeting with the hiring manager and discussing how this candidate, at a granular level, differed from successful team members. This ought to point out specific skills or values that are now quite literally “must-haves”.
Onboarding
Next, take a look at what happened since the hire’s first day at the company. Did their training differ from other team members? Was their ramp time too brief? If it wasn’t a skills issue, but perhaps a voluntary churn, was the candidate not made to feel welcome, or were they not given all the proper resources to settle in? Going back to the interview process, someone leaving your company by their own volition means the team may not have been as upfront or accurate when they described what life is like at your organization. There’s a real temptation to romanticize the job when in the courting process, but if you paint an unrealistic picture, you’re inviting churn.
How do you go about learning from bad hires? See you in the comments.
