Hiring 101: Mistakes to Avoid

Running a startup or small business is filled with challenges that it’s your job to overcome. From projecting the year’s revenue to making sure your employee benefits are up and running, there’s a lot to keep your mind on. One of the most important things to think about, however, is the hiring process. Hiring the right employees for your team can be make or break for any business, especially for a smaller organization where each individual contributes a larger share of the whole.

Today, we’re going over common hiring mistakes that are easy to make and critical to avoid. Don’t be too stressed if you’ve made one in the past; we’ve all been there. But going forward, especially since we’re likely working from home for the foreseeable future, keeping your eye on these potential mistakes will prove to be a game changer. 

Prioritizing quantity over quality:

When you’re first building out your team, it may be tempting to start hiring in bulk to get every conceivable position filled. However, the problem with this strategy is that you often don’t get a good sense for who exactly you’re hiring, where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and whether they might all work together as a team.

Instead of opting for a quantity over quality approach, flip your priorities and focus on slow and steady quality over pure quantity. Growing your team from a handful of entrepreneurs to a larger coalition of experts takes time if you want to do it right. Here are a few tips to ensure that slow and steady wins the race at your company, and that you are able to grow your team in a way that’s manageable, and has your organization’s best interests in mind:

● Reach out to your network, as oftentimes fellow professionals in your area will have plenty of young upstarts in their address books that they’re happy to put in contact with someone eager to hire. 

● Always conduct an employment background screening before completing the hiring process. In person interviews are a great start, and can definitely give you a sense of a potential hire, but they don’t reveal everything that you should be aware of.

● Consider instituting in-interview tests. Whether that’s a timed writing sample, a coding puzzle, or a creativity exercise, seeing how someone performs under pressure is a helpful way to see how they might perform at your company. 

Sometimes, you might need to make hires quickly and efficiently in order to keep the flow of service up to standards. That’s totally understandable. However, when you can help it, taking it slow and bringing on individual hires diligently and with care will almost always provide a greater return on investment in the long run.

Devaluing diverse experience and education:

Experience comes in all shapes and sizes. The 38 year old who taught himself to code after getting laid off from his coal mining job might be just as good a programmer as the recent Ivy League grad. Someone with a failed small restaurant business might have knowledge that the MBA never came across in her grad program. An English major focusing on 20th century literature might be a better copywriter than a marketing degree holder with five years of experience. 

The truth is that you never really know for sure who will be the best person to fill your position until you give them a chance. Far too many employers look for cookie-cutter resumes when trying to hire. There are two huge liabilities that come with that approach: one, you fail to see a great opportunity when it’s sitting right in front of you; and two, you might miss out on someone who has a critical mix of soft and hard skills, which, as experienced business owners know, is a rare combination to come by. 

When you’re searching for employees, don’t make the mistake of devaluing diverse sources and kinds of experience and education. And, better yet, widely advertise that you are accepting of a variety of different work and educational backgrounds for the positions that you can. This will attract the open-minded, creative people who are willing and able to put in the work to help your organization grow. 

Not involving the rest of your team:

Your team’s input matters. As the business owner, startup entrepreneur, or hiring manager, you may forget that it’s your team who will primarily be working with the new hire. Making sure they’re on the same wavelength, and that the potential hire has the on-the-ground skill set your team is looking for, is indispensable during the interview process. Here are a few ways that you can workshop your hiring process to be more inclusive of the entire team.

● Poll team members: What skills do they want to see prioritized in a new hire? What personality traits might make them easy and effective to work with? Consulting with your team beforehand will give you critical insights. 

● Invite your team into the interview: When it is time to bring in the potential new hire, having your team there to help interview them can greatly improve the process. They will ask specific questions managers might forget to, get a sense of how personable the interviewee is, and better understand the ways that they will fit in with day to day work.

● Debrief: After the interview, be sure to check in with your team. See what they thought of the interview, how they felt about the potential hire, and how they want to move forward.

Involving your team also helps you keep company culture in mind. Many hiring managers overly focused on hard skills and company expenses might forget about valuing company culture during the hiring process. Is your organization a small-town business with a folksy charm? A hip urban startup filled with trendy creative types? A coastal marketing firm run by beach bums? Getting the whole team involved makes it less likely this aspect of hiring will not be forgotten.

Making hiring mistakes can be a serious setback for your company. By staying informed on what the most strategically advantageous hiring moves are, you can avoid those mistakes. 

Author Bio: Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and is the managing editor for 365businesstips.com. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and traveling.