Hiring Mistake 6

Not developing a large enough pool of candidates

It follows quite naturally that if you develop poor job advertisements and then don't place them in the right media that you will not develop a large enough pool of candidates to give you the opportunity to make an effective selection.

This often comes about because as outlined above, employers are simply in too much of a hurry to replace employees who are leaving on the "fortuitous self-selection plan" and simply perpetuate the problem they had before by hiring yet another ineffective and inappropriate employee.

It all starts because of employer knows, deep down, that he simply doesn't have the time or expertise to interview a lot of candidates. For the employer who has this kind of problem on his plate, he sees the issues quite starkly in the following manner:

I don't want to spend a lot of money on this
I don't want to spend a lot of time on this
I really hope I find the right person quickly

This then quickly translates into a set of behaviors that are designed to find a small pool of candidates from which to choose.

Businesses who approach the hiring process from this standpoint are doomed to end up hiring the Tallest Pygmy.

The Four Critical Steps to Hiring

Establish the Profile
Develop the Process
Grade Candidates
Evaluate and Execute

Establish the Profile

Make sure that you know what talent you are trying to hire. Start from scratch and take time to define the job rather than rushing and simply rehiring the person that you are replacing.
Develop the Process

Successful hiring depends on having real choices. Write advertisements that will attract a large pool of candidates and have a process so that heavy response levels don’t stretch your resources .
Grade Candidates

You can’t afford to rush the selection process. You need to have an effective screening process and evaluate candidate skills carefully in relation to the job profile you established.
Evaluate and Execute

It is essential to have a robust interviewing process. You need to have candidates interviewed thoroughly and then check references and do background checks.

Hiring Edge Information

Job Matching

Job
Talent
Match

- Identify the soft skills the job requires -- if the job could talk, what would it say?
  
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Hiring Articles

The “Tallest Pygmy”

Are you hiring the first reasonable candidate that comes along? Do you ‘settle” rather than looking for better candidates? The problems with successful hiring all start with the “Tallest Pygmy” approach and cost incalculable amounts in lost productivity. A story illustrates the point:
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Fortuitous Self Selection

The problems in hiring generally start well before the hiring effort ever actually begins, and this is actually something of a vicious circle. Problems in the workforce aren’t addressed consistently and employers are confronted with the problem of an employee leaving suddenly. This leads to difficulties in hiring because owners try to hire a replacement too quickly.
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The Vicious Circle of Mediocrity

The root cause of many hiring issues stems from a fear of employees leaving. When it comes down to the true essentials many owners are actually afraid of their employees and the implications are particularly disturbing. Most business owners know, at some level, that they are poor at hiring and that they are better off holding on to what they have.
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Now that you have identified your Platinum Activities and set your Time Gain Goal, it is time to start the Time Edge process As laid out in Time as a Commitment, this involves changing the activities that you allow in your day, and the next step in the process is to start to replace the grains of sand falling through your personal hour glass with higher value activities.
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Research Studies have shown that people most often fail to act when they think simultaneously about the result they want and the actions they will need to take to accomplish it. The actions that need to be taken are often complex or uncomfortable, and trying to resolve the “how” can make it all too easy to decide that the “what” is just too overwhelming.
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The issues created by bundling together identification and action are amplified by the way the Tyranny of the Urgent comes into play. This requires that we just get things done, even if they are below our pay grade and don’t belong in our day. We do them because when they come up they are urgent and need to get done. We’re always too busy when they come up to delegate them, and the quickest way to get them out of the way is just to do them ourselves.
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