5 Bad Ways To Hire

Hiring someone is expensive. You will pay in three resources:

1. Time (doing it right takes time, and doing it wrong takes even more time...)
2. Money (obvious)
3. Organizational complexity. Each person you add to the org increases communication cost, etc.

With these costs in mind, you want to know what you're doing. And you want to get it right. Here are the classic hiring mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Hiring when you don't need to hire. 

Put simply, only hire when you have a clear and compelling business need to hire. Don't hire for ego, don't hire because your competitors are hiring, don't hire because you think you "should" hire. Hire when there is clear business pain or opportunity that can be best solved by hiring a talented individual. This includes hiring "all stars" without a clearly defined job for them to do. This often results in organizational chaos and pain down the line.

2. Hiring without a clear Target

Job descriptions are intended to define what’s needed in a role, but most fall short. They typically outline day-to-day responsibilities, ideal candidate qualities, and qualifications, but these are deeply flawed. Candidates may have done similar tasks before but performed poorly, and generic attributes like “team player” or “proactive” are overused clichés that fail to distinguish top talent or predict cultural fit. Qualifications, such as "3 years of product management experience," are often irrelevant proxies for the traits that truly matter. Instead, invest 45 minutes upfront to create a Target—a precise blueprint for each role—which can save countless hours of frustration and lead to better hires. It should contain the Results Expected for the role, as well as the key Competencies someone needs to thrive in your culture and in the specific role.

3. Hiring without interviewing

There are more and less extreme versions. The extreme version is caring so much about a resume (or a reference/referral) that you literally skip interviewing the person altogether. The less extreme version is conducting a series of interviews that are more focused on selling the candidate than actually vetting them. The thing both share in common? You fail to elicit the performance data that generally only comes from well-conducted interviews. The candidate knows their story (the good, the bad, and the ugly) better than anyone else. And they will tell it to a skilled, high-rapport interviewer.

4. Hiring with your gut

Related to the above. You do actually conduct an interview, but you don't deeply review your notes. Instead you form your impression during the interview and decide how "impressed" you were with the candidate. Or worse, how much you "liked" them. You'll often hear a phrase such as: "They performed really strongly. I can really see them working out well here." That often ends in frustration and wasted time for both parties 6-12 months down the line.

5. Doing it solo

Do professional assessors like Jordan and me render yes-or-no hiring decisions after a single interview with no other data to go on? Yes, but those assessments are 4 hours long and done by a professional assessor. When a Hiring Manager goes solo they usually are forming their opinion off a 1-hour interview and there is simply no way you can make a responsible hiring decision in that time frame. You have to divide-and-conquer the Target across several trained (and calibrated) interviewers who all bring their data together for a holistic hiring decision.