Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Reasons Why Managers Hate Having to Hire Anyone

Most managers hate the hiring process because:

10. It takes too much time and they have so many other things on their plates. Many feel screening and interviews just get in the way of getting their “real job” done.

9. When they need someone, they need them yesterday (or even three months ago). So they don’t really have time to do it right – to gather all the information they need to make an intelligent decision – and this makes them feel ineffectual.

8. The haystack has gotten so big that it takes a lot more time to find the needles. (It is so easy for people to apply that lots of unqualified people clog up the process.)

7. The government has so many laws about hiring that they can’t get the information they need to make a good decision. (And HR keeps telling them what they cannot do instead of the best ways to get the job done.)

6. The hiring processes/systems are designed by HR people, not operations people, so these systems often fail to meet the needs of hiring managers/supervisors.

5. Most have learned the hard way that they can’t believe what the applicants tell them, yet no one has taught them how to get them to tell us the truth.

4. References won’t tell them anything about their former employees because their lawyers have told them not to.*

3. The questions they ask are the same questions everyone else uses and the experienced applicants have all of the great answers down pat.

2. As hard as most of them try, they don’t know how to stop making decisions based on gut feel. So, they end up hiring the best applicant rather than the person who would be best at doing the job. (“How can I possibly hire someone I don’t like?”)

1. In terms of time, money, and aggravation, the cost of a hiring mistake is enormous, so not making a decision is better than making a wrong one. Many opt to just live with what they have.

This was originally published in the April 2014 Humetrics Hiring Hints newsletter.