Top 3 reasons why organisations in Singapore end up with bad hires

A fairly recent survey revealed that most organisations end up with bad hires but most don’t know why. As a result, these organisations end up suffering high employee attrition rates, low employee morale, poor employee engagement, and sub-standard performance.

Here are 3 reasons why organisations end up with so many bad hires.

1. Poor interview preparation

Prepare, prepare, prepare! Interviewers need to be thoroughly prepared prior to meeting any potential candidates for interviews.

Unfortunately, many Human Resources Managers & Hiring Managers go into interviews without adequate preparation. There are many reasons why HR & Hiring Managers go into interviews without adequate preparation. Some common reasons include:

• lack of time to prepare,
• too busy, or
• simply just disinterested.

However there is one particular reason that seems to always stand out -- and that is: Over-confidence. Many HR & Hiring Managers are over-confident because they feel that they have done interviews many times before and therefore feel there’s no need to prepare for the next interview.

This over-confidence also results in the lack of proper background checks of the candidates. The importance and criticality of background checks cannot be over-emphasized.

HR & Hiring Managers receive tons of Resumes and CVs from applicants all over the world, and background checks become imperative because of the diverse groups of people applying for jobs here in Singapore. (For more on background checks, please see my previous post.)

Interview preparation cannot be over-emphasized. Interviewers must be adequately prepared prior to conducting any interviews with any candidate.

2. Poor understanding of the role being filled

As the HR or Hiring Manager conducting the interview, it is vital that you are very clear about what you are looking for in the candidate prior to the actual interview. You need to know exactly what type of individual you are looking for.

It pays to understand the role you are recruiting for, particularly if you are an HR Manager doing the first rounds of interviewing on behalf of the hiring managers. It is extremely crucial that HR thoroughly understands the role that is being filled and work very closely with the hiring managers every step of the way.

HR cannot work independently from the hiring managers and vice versa.

For instance, if the team you are hiring for is highly autonomous and makes decisions very quickly, then you would most likely benefit from hiring someone who is comfortable with making decisions quickly and is able to handle ambiguity.

Hiring someone who is not able to handle ambiguity in this case would probably cause friction between the candidate and the rest of the team.

3. Poor questioning techniques

One of the most crucial determinants of successful hiring is how the questions are phrased. With vast information available on the Internet today, candidates come to interviews extremely well prepared. Many come with rote answers to standard questions.

Asking standard questions such as “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” are no longer as effective as before, because candidates will come well prepared with answers to such questions.

The purpose of the interview is for the recruiter/hiring manager to understand the candidate better. The key is to ask open-ended questions to encourage and allow the candidates to open up and talk. The more they talk, the better the opportunity to understand them.

Most HR & hiring managers are able to ask very good opening questions, however most begin to stumble after the candidates provide an answer.

Most don’t know what to ask as follow-up questions and most don’t know how to ask effective follow-up questions. It is at this juncture that most lose the opportunity to obtain greater insights into their candidates.

However asking great follow-up questions is not easy because formulating effective follow-up questions in real-time can be mentally taxing.

As a result, most interviewers end up asking poor follow-up questions and miss out on opportunities to find out more about the candidates.

If you want to minimise employee attrition rate in your organisation, it would be prudent to begin looking at your recruiting and interviewing processes and techniques, especially your interview questioning techniques.

It doesn’t matter whether you are using the Competency Based Interviewing techniques or Behavioural Interviewing Techniques, the most crucial determinant of your hiring success is what questions you ask, how you ask your questions, and how you encourage your candidates to be truthful.