Every company has felt that moment of doubt where you have just hired someone you think is a great candidate, and then when it all starts out, you quickly see this was not the hire for your company. Many different things could have impacted the hiring process, including a desperate hiring, which is never ideal and you can read more about on the Jason Hanold Blog. First things first, in an ideal situation your company will be looking to hire someone that will be able to stay on board for a long period of time and invest in your company. You could prevent this by taking a look at some signs during the hiring process to ensure that this is truly the candidate for you.
If a candidate doesn’t have enough information about your company, this may be an initial sign of the lack of interest for a long term commitment at your organization. From the start, you should have a very clear notion of the profile of leader your new hire prefers to work with. If this is not a match, it will really make your everyday workplace a complicated place to work at. Some personalities and matches will not necessarily be a healthy fit and this will not only affect the new hire and their line manager but the whole corporate climate and environment. Your candidate’s priorities should be aligned with the corporate ones, especially when that hire will be taking on a position of leadership. In the same line, having a similar opinion on various topics will be necessary to identify at this stage of the hiring process. One of these topics has to be the importance and relevance given to work/life balance and what each person’s definition of it is. The fact that the candidate and the company are on different positions, will drastically change the personal motivation that employees have with the company. Depending on the dynamic of the company, if a person prefers to work by themselves and does not play well with others, in most companies where collaboration is essential this will not be a desired trait.
Another key factor is the policies in your company for promotions in contract with the expected career goals of the candidates. If this is not a match, you will soon run into the consequences when your employee is not satisfied with their current position. Making sure the candidate fits in with your current team will be essential, because if they would only be able to tolerate them instead of genuinely get along, this will be a hiccup that could later become a big deal.
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These considerations are to be taken into account before making the hire, but sometimes they may seemingly pass these filters, or some may be skipped over during the process. Either way, ideally you’ll figure out this is not that candidate for you during the interview process. If that’s not the case then you may begin to feel the situation slowly turn in a very different direction. You could find yourself with a person who seems to be negative about everything going on around them, something that may not have come out during the interview process, but once hired came to light. This constant complainer will normally have something to say about everything, changing the corporate climate in a very negative way. It may even get to the point where employees begin to complain, and once this happens you know that something needs to be done. Another telling attitude trait will be that they are not willing to work in a dynamic work environment, and will limit themselves to the tasks that are detailed in their contract. This goes especially for startups and smaller organizations. If the new hire is at a manager position, a big difficulty may be when this person wants to befriend everyone on the team, instead of focusing on becoming a strong leader. For the cases of those in the digital literacy generation that can’t seem to stay away from Facebook and other social media networks, it will be quite telling if they constantly and during work hours take time to check, update or post things on these sites. This among many other very specific traits will start to show through during those first few months, that will demonstrate to you and your team that this was not the candidate for your organization.
If this is the case your company in that time could experience unfortunate side effects like productivity, financial, employee morale, or reputation. At this point, you’ll need to consider, depending on the seriousness of the issues that have come up, whether this employee should continue working in your company or not. Once this decision is made, you’ll also need to consider what changes need to be made to the selection process to avoid this from occurring in other circumstances.