Hire in haste, repent at leisure – How bad employment practice can damage your business

When you decide to hire a new team member, you are actually making a decision that could have some quite major repercussions. A new employee means a cost that is not just the investment in salary and resources; it will also have an influence on the time and operational procedures of the business. What you want to happen, of course, is that the new team member will have a positive impact in terms of the service and job function. This return will usually be high enough that the material cost of employment is soon overtaken by the return from having a great new team member. In the case of the IT arena, this return is often very specific in terms of the highly specialised skill sets or experience, but even in less critical areas, employing the wrong person can be a nightmare.

Hiring the wrong person often costs a lot more than a few months of salary.

We were talking about leadership in a recent article and mentioned how the ability to stand back and allow the team to work was an important catalyst to a successful team. This kind of empowerment leads to businesses that have effective and happy employees who are invested and have job satisfaction. However, a bad hire can impact on your team very quickly. A bad hire will usually result in a lot of additional micro-management, and potentially:

• Loss of time due to the need for individual attention
• A disrupted work area
• A Lower level of morale in the current team
• Investment in training that does not bear fruit
• Repeated attempts to develop an employee that is never going to improve
• A final outcome of a potential dismissal procedure
• Re-starting the hiring process

These are just some of the problems you may be facing if the wrong decision is made at the hiring stage.

It’s critical to make the right choice from the start

A good recruiter should be able to help you avoid this situation by making sure you have made the best possible choice in the first place. In many respects, it is the reason we are so invested in getting to know who you are as a client or candidate. Anyone can shuffle CVs and match skills, it takes experience and an understanding of the industry to recruit well. Employing a good team member is about finding someone who will not only meet the needs of the role but will also meet the needs of your particular environment. Your ethos and company values, your current team, your vision for development and all the other factors that make a company as individual as the people within it should be part of the hiring process. It is critical that you make the right choice at the start.

For the candidate, the decision to accept an offer from an employer is clearly very important. They are taking a financial and career step that is intimately linked to their wellbeing and personal happiness. When you are unhappy at work it throws a cloud over everything and, while we all suffer from the Monday morning blues now and again, a long-term dissatisfaction can actually affect your health.

Don’t just fill the role, fill the role correctly

As candidate or employer, a mistake made at the point of hiring a new team member can result in some pretty unpleasant fallout. In a skills-heavy market such as IT, the pressure to settle for best fit can be dangerous. It would be naive to think that there is not some compromise involved in the hiring process sometimes, but if you look to simply fill the role rather than fill the role correctly, or get a job rather than the right job, you could find yourself with a lot of time to regret the decision before the situation is resolved.

That is why we work so hard to make sure that we do something just as important as matching skills – we match people.