Every Bad Hire Was Once Someone's Best Candidate

The greatest danger in hiring isn't choosing the wrong candidate.

It's becoming convinced you've found the right one before you've determined whether the candidate and organization are aligned in ways that matter most.

In the first two issues of this series, I argued that the people you need don't need you and that the rules of recruiting have changed. Attracting the right candidates now requires organizations to think differently about how they communicate opportunities and engage prospective employees.

Unfortunately, many organizations make their costliest recruiting mistakes after finding promising candidates. By that point, the position may have been open for weeks or months.

Teams are stretched. Managers are frustrated. Operations are suffering. Customers may be feeling the impact. Leadership wants the problem solved.

Under those conditions, the pressure to hire begins influencing the decision-making process. The attraction of a promising candidate begins to carry more weight than it should.

That's where trouble starts.

The challenge is that the factors most likely to determine long-term success are also the hardest to evaluate during the hiring process.

Most organizations place significant emphasis on qualifications, experience, industry knowledge, certifications, and technical skills. Those things matter and should absolutely be part of the evaluation process.

They provide useful information and reveal little about whether a candidate will fit your organization or ultimately succeed within it.

Hiring decisions are about the future. Résumés are largely a record of the past.

Hiring failures are rarely about technical competence. They happen because expectations were never truly aligned.

Qualifications, experience, and technical skills do not predict how candidates will behave, adapt, respond to change, work with others, embrace accountability, or contribute to the future your organization is trying to create.

All too often, candidates believe they are joining one type of organization. Organizations believe they are hiring one type of employee. Neither is necessarily wrong.

Behaviors that seemed perfectly reasonable to one party create frustration for the other.

One expects greater autonomy while the other expects greater collaboration. One expects greater support while the other expects greater initiative. One views change as opportunity while the other views it as disruption.

Neither side fully understands these gaps until after the hiring decision has already been made.

The result is predictable.

Co-workers are disrupted. Managers become frustrated. Operations suffer. The relationship deteriorates. Eventually, both sides begin questioning a hiring decision that initially felt right.

And the new employee becomes the lightning rod.

Organizations get exactly the hiring result their decision process produces.

Better hiring outcomes require better hiring decisions.

That's why the most important hiring decisions extend beyond qualifications, experience, and technical skills.

They're about determining which candidate is most likely to succeed within the environment, share common expectations, and see the same future your organization is pursuing.

The best candidate must understand where the organization is headed, what will be expected of them when they get there, and genuinely want to be part of the team making that journey.

You must also understand how the candidate thinks about accountability, change, teamwork, responsibility, communication, and growth.

Those traits are more subjective. They are harder to evaluate, harder to compare, and harder to defend. They are also the factors most likely to determine whether the hiring decision succeeds.

The question isn't whether candidates can do the job.

The question is whether they genuinely want to be part of the team helping your organization achieve what it is trying to accomplish.

That's why the best candidate is not always the one who looks best on paper.

Remember, every bad hire was once someone's best candidate.

If you'd like to explore ways to shift how your team evaluates candidates, let's spend 20 minutes discussing whether your hiring process is helping you identify the right people or the people who make today's hiring problems disappear and feel solved.

Questions? Email larry@mandelberg.biz. Want a copy of my book/framework? Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide — how to survive success and thrive in good times and bad

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