As we move into 2025, making smart hires is one of the most important things to get right in your business. Bad hires are expensive mistakes. If we dig a little deeper into the science and psychology behind hiring, we see that it’s often our ability to effectively read, judge, and test people in the right ways that often falls short in the hiring process. Training your decision makers to hone these skills is one of the best ways to avoid bad hires. Here are a few tips to share with your team to help you become more effective at noticing red flags and uncovering what really matters to you when evaluating candidates for jobs at your company:
1.. Get clear on the hard skills you require and how you will reliably establish if candidates actually have those skills.
This means testing in some way – whether live during your interview process or in the form of pre-hire assessments designed to help you evaluate skill level at everything from systems, software, and math to writing, communication, and customer service. A failure to test candidates on their proficiency with things that matter most in your job is often a quick recipe for a bad hire.
2.. Determine how much being a culture fit matters – and spoiler – it matters a LOT for most businesses – especially smaller ones.
A thoroughly tested employee who demonstrates a high level of skill in the systems or skills you need is critical, but you also have to like them and their colleagues need to like them too. Putting candidates through interviews with multiple people on your team is a good way to flush out culture fit, and having them meet with their ‘would be’ team members helps gauge chemistry and personality fit with others on the team. Yes, this adds a little time to your hiring process, but generally it’s time well spent. Consider investing the time to do this with your frontrunner candidates in particular… not necessarily everyone who you consider.
3.. Be frank with candidates about your expectations for the role and for the timeline you expect them to be operating at full speed.
Often one of the challenges we hear businesses experience with a bad hire revolves around their inability to get “up to speed” fast enough and perform at the level expected. Talk openly about your expectations for things like project timelines, business results, and training milestones. Ask what concerns or reservations they may have and whether they foresee any roadblocks to meeting those timelines. Being really clear about your expectations for this is important and so is interpreting how potential employees react to them during the screening process. Hesitation, pushback, and even minimizing or dismissing your concerns about this could be signs of potential challenges ahead.
4. Hone your skills at behavioral interviewing to help you effectively evaluate soft skills.
There are courses you can take to develop behavioral interviewing skills so you’re more effective at reading people during interviews. Behavioral interviewing helps assess things like personality, communication style, judgement, problem solving skills, and sense of urgency to help you know if they’d be a good fit for your team. These questions don’t have a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer and you can use real examples from problems you’ve had with employees in the past to see how your candidate might handle a similar situation. For example, “Tell me about a time when you had to deliver bad news to a client” or “You realized you made a big mistake in a calculation that impacts other work at the company. How do you address it and what do you do first?”
5.. Notice patterns in your bad hires and learn from past mistakes.
It’s hard to get it right all of the time. Hiring mistakes go with the territory of growing a business (and growing as a business leader). We’re always evolving, gaining wisdom, and learning from experience (good and bad). Effectively reflecting on previous bad hires is a part of gaining that wisdom and being able to use it as fuel to be better. Take some time to think about your hiring “misses” and what went wrong, what you misjudged, or what you failed to pick up on. If you notice patterns, this is a great way to quickly adapt your hiring strategy and screening process in a way that helps you avoid hiring people who fall into that similar pattern of behavior.
6. Don’t forget about background checks and reference checks.
The importance of running a background check can’t be minimized for jobs where candidates have access to confidential, proprietary, financial, or other important data and information. This is a critical safety and risk mitigation step. Reference checks have become less common, but can help you uncover surprising details about a potential employee’s background, work ethic, and personality. Professional references may offer varying degrees of useful information if they are from a current or previous employer with rules about how much information they will release, so asking for a personal reference from a prior coworker or friend can also offer a good picture of who your candidate really is. Reference choices are always interesting. The way that process unfolds often gives you a lot of great insight and can be really helpful at uncovering red flags.
Have an HR question? Please feel free to reach out to us by phone, email, or webchat. We love helping growing companies thrive and we’d love to hear from you.
