Sometimes a job candidate can look great on paper. The job candidate may have the right education, skills and experience necessary to perform in the position, but often that is not enough, says Tom Davenport, senior consultant at Towers Watson, a global professional services company in New York City. To be successful at a company, it takes more than the perfect résumé. While the right experience match is certainly important, a job candidate must also fit into the company and position's culture.
"A bad hire is not someone who was a great performer but suddenly had problems later on," Davenport says. "A bad hire is someone who just didn't fit the culture or the specific position from the beginning, so the problem starts with how you hire, how you conceive of what's required to be successful in the job and how you assess candidates against those success requirements. You can list all these requirements, skills and educational expectations, but if you boil it right down, you need to define what differentiates successful people from unsuccessful ones and how do we look for that."
When first beginning the job search, Davenport suggests taking a look at past performers and examine the top 5 percent of performers who succeeded in their positions. Beyond comparing their educational and skills experiences, look at what went well and what did not when they were first hired.
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Conversely, Davenport also recommends looking at past poor performers and analyzing why they failed. Sometimes it could have been just a mismatched culture fit, but they also may have failed because of the company's flaws in its onboarding process, which gives the company a chance to see if there is room for improvement.
"Let's not just list all the qualifications and the experience levels, but let's peel it back and see what's hard about this position," Davenport says. "What are likely to be one or two elements that are the tipping point between success and failure for this job? All aspects of a job are not created equal; some elements are a lot more challenging, so let's make sure we hire for people who can handle those and specifically address those issues during orientation."
Take call center jobs, for example, Davenport says. When searching for job candidates for these positions, many employers have a tendency to focus on the wrong areas of qualifications. Instead of getting into the core of what is needed to succeed, employers advertise qualifications that include a pleasant personality who enjoys being on the phone, but call center jobs aren't always that easy. While a pleasant personality certainly helps, it takes more than that to succeed in this type of position.
"Call center jobs are difficult," Davenport says. "They're demanding and tedious in lots of ways. What's really hard about those jobs is you have to deal with difficult situations, provide advice quickly in tricky spots and successfully balance providing service versus staying too long on the phone. The fundamental problem is that companies haven't done a very honest job of conveying what the real challenges of the jobs are, so the company kids itself and then is surprised when people leave."
Although some companies may brush off bad hires as replaceable, Davenport believes this is a mistake because both recruiting and training employees are costly. Rather than hiring a higher number of employees with the understanding that turnover will happen, Davenport recommends employers take the time to fill the position with the right employees, which ultimately reduces an employer's bottom line.
"Turnover costs can be calculated from a few thousand dollars to a multiple of annual salary, and one or two times in annual salary is not an uncommon number to attach to turnover," Davenport says. "You're looking at a cost that's high enough that organizations sometimes put too much urgency on filling the job and not enough on filling it correctly. If you take 60 days instead of 30 days to find a candidate with the right potential, you're going save your organization a lot of time and money, and that would be a wait worth enduring."
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