46% of employers admit to making a bad hire. How can you avoid making this $37,000 mistake?
...and it's only $37,000 if you pay an US average salary.
The department of labour estimates that a bad hire can cost you up to 30% of first year salary. On the other hand, a good hire can boost your revenue margins by 40%. With 46% of employers admitting to making a bad hire, it is clear that the interview process leaves space for improvement.
So, what factors characterize a bad hire?
.png)
...And how can you test them in an interview?
1. Coach-ability & Emotional Intelligence
Coach-ability, or the ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers and others is the top trait missed in bad hires. Whilst Emotional Intelligence, the ability to understand and manage one's emotions, and accurately assess others emotions, comes in 2nd place. Both these characteristics can be tested in similar ways.
- Quick and easy - The behavioral interview
Past behavior can be a good signal of future behavior, and so behavioral questions - aka - "tell me about a time in your last job where you received constructive feedback" are a good place to start. My opinion is that this question is still too leading (you kind of know what the right answer should be), so perhaps reframing to "tell me about a time where you produced a piece of work your manager didn't like" is better because its more ambiguous. Did you agree with this feedback? Is this an opportunity to show that you pushed it through anyway?
VERDICT:
OK, but candidate can still prep this question, which makes it harder to reveal actual behavior
- More subtle - simulate a feedback situation
For Coach-ability:
Ask the candidate to submit a piece of work before the in-person interview. Even better, if it's a favorite piece of work. Irrespective of what you think about the work, give them constructive feedback and watch how they react. A good candidate will view this as a learning opportunity.
For EI:
Similar to the situation above, get them to go through a case study answering a problem. Then take on the role of an unhappy stakeholders and see how they respond. Do they think about what you're incentives?
VERDICT:
Better, because the question gets a more honest reaction than the first approach. The method though, is perhaps morally questionable.
- LMNS Challenge
Get them to participate in a LMNS challenge! The LMNS challenge is a better alternative because you actually have objective data to back up your feedback on a candidate's work (e.g. your creative had a CTR of 4.4%, that's 2nd place).
In a recent challenge we saw the beauty of coach-ability manifest itself. The winning candidate sought to view the other competition entries because they liked their approach and wanted to see if they could use it. Aka, high coach-ability. Although this candidate won, they found other submissions interesting and wanted to learn more.
On the other hand, another candidate was unhappy with their rank and their reaction was to blame the process:
"The other candidate won because they cheated"
This was definitely untrue, and perhaps more ironic given I knew this candidate had used their connections to boost their own results.
"For me a creative means something with a picture, so I didn't know I could do text".
Whilst this last part may be factually true, the challenge, in its outline specifically said you could make a message or a post, and the data given suggested strongly that this would be the best tactic.
Nonetheless, the moral of the story is somewhere else. Yes, the other candidate demonstrated technical ability, but they failed to demonstrate coach-ability. Rather than seeking to understand how they could improve, they blamed the process for their results.
VERDICT:
The best, because you get the honest reaction of a candidate, without the leading question.
2. Motivation & Technical Competence
Accounting for 28%, Motivation and Technical Competence can be assessed using the same process.
Motivation is fairly easy to test in an interview with any kind of assessment. If the candidate completes the assessment, they show motivation, if not, they don't, it's fairly simple. That same assessment can be used to test their technical skill, and the results of that skill show objectively whether the person has the skill or not. So it could be that a candidate has the motivation, but not the technical competence.
1. Quick and easy - Add a correct response assessment
For marketers, this could be an initial screen that asks things like "What does CTR stand for?" or "Which of these metrics is a useful tool to measure engagement". It's important that these questions have a right answer so they are easy to assess.
VERDICT:
These questions measure how well somebody can use a tool, but they tell you nothing about the person that answered them
2. More effort - Case study
Rather than a list of multiple choice questions, give the candidates more freedom to express their skills with a classic case study. The amount of work, or motivation, that goes into a case study can be gaged from the quality of content, whilst the technical competence can be assessed from how they used the information provided to develop their solutions.
VERDICT:
Quality of content she said. And that's precisely the issue. At the end of the day, although the case study is a good simulation, it will still be resting on the shoulders of your subjective assessment. Can you really say that you would judge a solution similar to yours as favorably as one you had never heard of before?
3. LMNS Challenge
I ask this because that's precisely what happened to us in one of our earliest challenges. 2 candidates, 2 case studies, 2 beautiful presentations, us and the client had our favorites, except the client preferred the presentation with less concrete information (IMHO). We put the candidates to the challenge, and the winner was unquestionable. The market research the first candidate had done, the specifics they had researched meant they nailed the target audience and it showed:164k views in 1 week.
But the advantage of the challenge was that it showed that results objectively. One could question which candidate to pick after the case study, whereas that same choice was impossible with the challenge.
4. Temperament
Temperament (15%): Attitude and personality suited to the particular job and work environment.
There it is, the 1 thing that can actually be tested in a normal traditional interview!
So there it is, 5 tips on how you can get rid of those bad hires by reformulating your interview questions. The quick and easy approaches have become more normal in companies, but because they still have a "right answer" they don't paint the whole picture. The middle ground questions, whilst significantly better at getting to the root of the problem do so in a mischievous way, I can understand some employers might not be comfortable with (although at the end of they day, both parties are trying to establish fit so) which leads us to the last point. The LMNS process, yes, its our company process but we designed it this way because it addresses all 4 main factors in the cleanest, most objective way. With 1 challenge, you effectively simulate 18months worth of experience.
Further Reading:
- Why New Hires Fail (Emotional Intelligence Vs. Skill)
- Job Interviews Are Broken. There's a Way to Fix Them.