Hiring the wrong person for any job costs your company money, but a bad hire in a technology position costs much more. According to a Career Builder survey, a business loses an average of $14,900 on each bad hire, and about 74% of businesses say they’ve made a bad hire. Let’s review this topic in more depth below.
It’s Not Just Money You Lose
The cost of a bad hire comes from more than the portion of the position’s salary you spend before firing them. It costs lost productivity on their part and their co-workers, plus the added expenses of recruiting, hiring, and training their replacement. Your bad hire could also bring down the company’s morale and cause others to lose productivity. So, how do you avoid this costly mistake?
A Better Way of Hiring
Manufacturing accounts for 12% of the total U.S. gross domestic product, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. That’s $2.3 trillion, and although your business may comprise a small part of it, preserving its success matters. Help your business avoid bad hiring by changing the way you approach technology hiring.
Use the project solution method of hiring. When you contact candidates that you would typically interview for a position, meet them instead with a consulting assignment. Pay them the going rate for two hours of their time to solve a small, self-contained problem. Meet with them on a Friday and provide the assignment, due on Monday. Monday, at your second meeting, review their solution and pay them.
What the Project Process Provides
Rather than losing thousands of dollars, you spend a few hundred dollars getting three or four perspectives and complete solutions. The small test project also lets you find out what it’s like working with the individual. How seriously did they take the assignment? How well-thought-out and complete of a solution did they provide?
A test project also allows the individuals to showcase their skills. Listing Python on a resume doesn’t show you the level of skill in programming a person has, but a project requiring it does. A test project also reveals other skills, such as user experience (UX) design and problem-solving approaches.
Your first-hand interaction with the individual, in-person and via e-mail, reveals how they communicate for work. While it won’t reveal any potential personality conflicts with the office gossip or the fact that they need multiple cups of coffee before becoming communicative, no interview will do that either. Ultimately, every individual views each hire differently. For instance, 62% of small business owners think their accountant does all they can to minimize their taxes, while 14% think the accountant could do more. This can impact how you complete tasks in the office.
Don’t Let a Bad Tech Hire Bring Down Your Business
Anyone you hire, you can fire. Regardless of the reason your tech hire went badly, you can eliminate them. You can (and should) fire them if they flat-out lie on their resume and have none of the programming or engineering skills they claimed. Document your reason and then move on to finding their replacement. Be sure to consult HR about this move.
The sooner you eliminate them from your staff, the quicker you can create a new solution. Remake your interview process to skip the trick questions meant to find out the deep, meaningful truths about a person. Instead, focus on test projects that pay them so they take it seriously and you can learn first-hand if they can do the job. Hiring for tech means knowing that the individual can handle any problem that arises, work independently, and solve it.
