Businesses spend a lot of money hiring, onboarding, and training new employees. It’s a substantial investment of time and finances for the company. Each time an organization hires a new employee, it costs them thousands of dollars.
With such a large investment, what happens when the new hires are underperforming or not meeting business expectations? A good place to start is by looking at the hiring process. It’s often found the failure of new hires falls on the employer, and for many reasons. Let’s dive into a few reasons why new hires are underperforming.
Hiring Too Fast
A lot of businesses only hire when they have an immediate role to be filled. While that’s an obvious reason to find a new employee, it’s a best practice to hire before you are in dire need.
Too often, when a role needs to be filled quickly, the hiring process is rushed and therefore “red flags” or signs of a cultural misfit aren’t always clear or brought to light. Whether the hiring team is rushing through interviews or skipping background checks, moving too quickly through the hiring process doesn’t allow the company to learn everything they need to about the candidate.
The same is true for the candidate as well. If they aren’t given enough time to ask their questions and get a sense of what it’s like to work for the company, there could be a cultural or job-fit misalignment.
Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills
Hiring teams should focus on hiring employees based on their potential success, instead of focusing on their previous success. Concentrating on soft skills traits like leadership, cooperation, empathy, drive, openness, abstract thinking, and more, will allow you to better align the candidate with your team.
So how do you hire for soft skills? Psychometric assessments will help you understand the valuable soft skills that your candidates bring to the table. By looking at their soft skills, you can compare them to the company and the teams they will be on. This allows the hiring manager to make more informed decisions when it comes to hiring new candidates and selecting which ones match the company needs.
Roles Within a Team
If a new hire doesn’t understand what their role is on a team, they are going to become disengaged, leading to poor performance or possibly even a decision to leave the company. If they know how they impact and benefit the team, business, and its outcomes, they are going to be successful, simply due to them having a sense of purpose and belonging.
No Real Onboarding
Another factor that leads to new hires not working out is that they weren’t taken through an onboarding process. An onboarding process can vary from company to company, but having one is paramount.
Good&Co Pro users are able to provide their candidates with an Onboarding Report. This report gives them a sense of what it’s like to work with their managers and other teammates by showing them which skills they possess and how their own skills compliment them. Candidates using this report feel more confident because they understand how to work better with their teams, as the report explains how to best work with each individual.
Not only does an onboarding process set new hires up for success, but it is also an early indicator of what it’s going to be like working at your company. This is the perfect time for hiring teams to instill the company values and begin showing the new hire why accepting the position was a great idea.
Bad Fit
It’s usually an oversight of the employer when a candidate isn’t successful. However, there are instances where it’s not. It’s been found that roughly 85% of employers have caught candidates lying on their resumes. If candidates have misrepresented their experience or skills, it’s definitely not the fault of the employer. It’s important to ask questions about the candidates resume during the interview to catch any misrepresentations.
If you have gone through all of the steps to ensure the candidate was a perfect match, you onboarded and trained them properly, and it still doesn’t work out, sometimes, but very rarely, candidates are just unable to integrate into your culture and team, and that’s something unpreventable. At that moment, it’s time to move on and use the tools that have allowed you to hire successful candidates in the past again.
About the author: Driven by the goal to help the American workplace become happier, healthier and more efficient for both employees and employers, Samar Birwadker cooked up the concept for Good&Co in 2012. As CEO, he has led diverse teams of technologists, designers, and researchers to drive breakthrough product innovation – a role that aligns perfectly with his Good&Co Persona: an innovative blend of the Maverick, Visionary, and Go-Getter. He is responsible for scaling the company after it was acquired by Axel Springer GmBH in 2016.
