Worst Hire - my lessons
My entrepreneurial journey has been fascinating. I’ve had numerous experiences that have taught me valuable lessons. One such experience came from hiring the worst person for the job.
Let’s discuss the lessons I learned and help you avoid this mistake.
Instincts
Trusting your instincts is a good thing to do. 90% of the time, it will help you and probably save you. This isn’t always the business case. Emotions and instincts can cloud your judgment and lead you to make poor decisions. I made the mistake early on to believe a perfect interviewee would be the right fit for my company. I’ve had some of my best employees have poor interviews. Instinct would lead you to go for the best interviewee. Instincts aren’t overly reliable in the dynamics of running a business.
Be Thorough in Recruitment
The recruitment process is vital to obtaining a new employee. Fine-tuning and streamlining this process will help you eliminate poor candidates. Our current recruitment system is better suited to select competent people. I previously had a lax recruitment system. It only involved a Google meeting and a takeaway task to complete. It’s safe to say there were many loopholes to exploit, and many did. This one candidate had a friend coach them through the interview and did the task for them. Our previous system did not account for this. We hired the worst person for the job. A proper system will ensure you get the best person to improve your organization.
Looks can be deceiving
A person’s initial portrayal doesn’t reflect who they are. This ties into trusting your instinct a little too much. People may be weird or poor in interviews, only to become the best hire you could make. Others can ace the interview and appear as the perfect candidates but are utterly incompetent. All that glitters is not gold. Take the interviews at face value and research other aspects they portray. This will help you make the best decision with the information you have. Remember, some of my best recruits had forgettable interviews. This one person who taught me these lessons had the best interview.
Conclusion
Numerous things need to go right to hire the right person. You should have a strict recruitment process, be level-headed, and not overly rely on the optics of the interview. It is a mixed-bag process. You never know what intangibles any potential recruit has. Following these tips will help you avoid the mistakes I made. Getting the right people on board is vital for the success of any business. We may make a mistake or two along the way, but the important thing is what we learn from them.
For these and more thoughts, guides and insights visit my blog at martinbaun.com
Thanks for sharing
You are very welcome :)
The problem with hiring is that most people hire by gut feeling. And this is not a proper process, and where there's no process, there's no tracking and no systemic improvement.
I've read some research in this topic and while nothing can guarantee success, the best predictors are job simulations/work samples, and cognitive habilities.
This is of course quite generic and depending on the job, soft skills will have more or less impact in job performance, but it gives some guidelines.
This is actually a subject I'm heavily considering building a product for as I see there's a need. The challenge I face is that market penetration is not high, and searches show a few people are actually looking for different, more data-driven approaches.
I applaud that approach and I would like to see how you'd create that! Job simulations are fine, I use them myself, but even that can have a go-around, sadly.
As a founder of a design agency, I went through hundreds of different candidates. It's very hard to pick the right person from the interviewing process. You need to give them some trial period to work along with. No interview process will show you how you are going to work together. Sometimes people tend to pretend to be a perfect fit for the role, but then you have a mismatch in values and work ethics -- they say one thing, that in a month could be forgotten. Trust your intuition, and give your candidate some time for adaptation and mistakes.
Agreed. I employ the trial period method as well.
As founders, understanding that we need to give ourselves extra grace during this process is also important.
From hiring the off-base individual, I learned that it's critical not to fair go by intestine sentiments or to begin with impressions. Making the enlisting prepare superior and checking candidates more carefully makes a difference to create beyond any doubt we choose the correct individual for the work. A awesome meet doesn't continuously cruel somebody will be a awesome representative. This instructed me to be more cautious when enlisting.
I believe that minimizing the risk of selecting an unsuitable candidate can be achieved by structuring interviews to assess all relevant skills, particularly soft skills. In my experience, collaborative problem-solving tests with interviewers are especially valuable. One of my favorite interview formats involves a take-home test that requires a few hours of work, followed by a subsequent interview where the candidate and interviewer continue working on the same problem for an extended period. This approach provides a comprehensive evaluation of the candidate’s abilities. It's by no means supposed to be the only stage of the interview but in my experience helps a lot in filtering out potentially risky candidates.
Solid tip, thanks for that! I also instruct the candidate to perform certain tasks with me, just to gauge their way of thinking. But your take-home test has brought up some food for thought.
Thank you for sharing.
A bunch of successful founders recommend the book "Who" by Geoff Smart.
-- Really, try look for superstars.
And when you find good people, incentivize the shit out of them to stay. Share a piece of the pie.
Thanks for the recommendation, Marius. I'll be sure to check that book out :)
PS: All the best on Mixsave!