How to Insure Against a Bad Hire

Behavior-based interviewing training experts do not want all of your interviews to go well.

Just think about it.  Most interviews go pretty well. Job candidates are on their very best behavior and often seem to have the perfect answers to your standard interview questions. But can you be sure they will perform as well on the job as they did in the interview?

You had better be sure. A recent study from CareerBuilder highlights the negative impact of a bad hire. The cost in dollars can be more than $50,000 according to 27% of U.S. employers. Perhaps even more costly is the loss of productivity, the decrease in employee morale and the increase in problems with client relations.

Here are some of the statistics around what can happen when you make a bad hiring decision:

• Over a third of U.S. employers report a serious loss of productivity. It takes time to ramp new employees up to speed. When they don’t work out, there is time wasted in recruiting and training another worker. 


• 32% of U.S. companies report that bad hires negatively affect employee morale. How? Substandard workers drag down team targets and, while they are tolerated, hardworking employees are discouraged from extra effort and feel unappreciated.


• Nearly one-fifth of U.S. employers surveyed also spoke of the impact on client relations and sales. When customer-facing employees do not represent your company well, clients are apt to back off and look to the competition for better treatment.

The solution?  Better interviewing approaches. It takes a proven behavior based interviewing training program to teach your hiring managers and interviewer teams how to dig beneath the surface of a savvy job candidate’s replies in order to get a true picture of their values, their work ethic, their strengths, and their culture fit. Their technical skills should be easily checked by reviewing their resumes, making some calls and running them through some scenarios. But what is equally important is learning about their attitude and true behavior on past jobs. This needs to be your focus.  And only proven behavior-based interviewing techniques combined with role-plays can give you that critical predictive insight.

To have better interviews, make sure that you:

1. Define the Job.
   Define a clear and relevant job profile with all key stakeholders that includes the metrics for success along with the critical few motivational, interpersonal and intellectual behavior-based competencies necessary to succeed.


2. Select an Interview Team.
   For most jobs, an interview team of four people is enough to adequately cover the assigned behavior-based competency probes.  Use a larger team if it makes sense culturally to get input and buy-in from a larger audience.


3. Pre-Screen Interview Candidates.
   Review resumes, perform phone screens and use customized hiring assessments to ensure that only qualified candidates are interviewed by the team.


4. Use Behavior-Based Interviewing Techniques.
   Use what you learned in behavior-based interviewing training to better predict future on-the-job performance and behavior by looking for past and present evidence that they are a good match for your specific job profile and organizational culture.

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