In my first experience in hiring for a multi-national company, I experienced the following issues.
1. Desperation hiring – After the global financial crisis and several rounds of restructuring, employee morale was at an all time low with many unproductive and just waiting until the market improved and something better came along. The minute a better offer was presented, employees resigned with the minimum notice period making recruiting replacements in a short time frame extremely difficult. Due to the nature of the business, specific licences were essential for some roles and the requirement to be bilingual was another factor that further complicated matters. Hiring under such pressure often meant that the candidates had to be sourced from a shallow pool and as a result their performance after joining was often below expectation.
Being more proactive in predicting employee resignations (often it was quite obvious, however management chose to turn a blind eye) would have helped to ensure that a potential candidates were ready to be introduced at short notice. As a preventative measure, department managers may have been able to avoid many of the resignations from happening in the first place had they spent adequate time on communicating to their key employees that they were not going to be the next in line in terms of downsizing.
2. Superficial interviewing – I think that this is linked to the desperation of the situation and needing to get an employee into a position ASAP, as often the facts were not checked or testing omitted due to time constraints.
Only after several bad hires became apparent, a rule was made that the processes must be followed at all times (testing, reference and background checks etc.) despite the urgency of the situation. Just finding a person to fill the position was not good enough and we needed to spend the appropriate amount of time to ensure that they were the right person for the job.
3. Snap judgment – Also often related to the urgency of the situation, unstructured interviews by whoever was available to meet with candidates at the time meant that there was no proper benchmarking taking place. If the candidate was able to manage to “hit it off” with the interviewer, then this often overshadowed their concrete previous experience and suitability for the role.
Unfortunately management believed that HR did not need to be a part of the interview process and so we were mainly responsible for sourcing candidates and then signing them on once they had been selected. As more bad hiring decisions became evident, it was obvious that HR should be involved in the interview process as well. My opinion was that HR should be involved in the first round of interviews to confirm the candidate’s employment history, soft skills and determine if they were a good cultural match for the company. Managers on the other hand should aim to focus on confirming the hard skills and if the candidate has the core competencies required for the position.
