Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Ways to Guarantee You Hire the Wrong Person

Here are the Top 10 ways to guarantee that you hire exactly the wrong person:

You don’t have a clear picture of exactly which mental and physical capacities, attitudes, personality traits, and skills you need to hire.
Instead of gleaning information from the candidate first, you tell the candidate all about the job and the kind of person you are looking for.
You only recruit from the pool of people who are looking for a job rather than from your best prospects – the gainfully employed who may be interested in a new and/or better job opportunity.
Your best people are too busy working on “more important” things, so they don’t get involved in the selection process.
You make it too difficult and time-consuming for busy, working people to get into your hiring system.
You use the same interview questions that everyone else does and every applicant gives you all the standard canned answers.
Your interviewers do most of the talking when they really should be doing most of the listening.
You don’t recognize that every step in the hiring process is a pass/fail screening test, and that you need to look at every single step as a test.
If your hiring system screens applicants out for the lack of education and/or experience, it’s probably screening out some of your best applicants. What you need is a system that screens in talent and the right attitudes.
You don’t realize how important it is to make sure you only hire STAR employees.

This originally appeared in Humetrics November 2015 Hiring Hints newsletter.