By Emmanuel Zvada
CAN your business afford to hire a slacker, job hopper or toxic employee? No. The hiring process is complicated, time-consuming and stressful, and frankly, a lot of people don’t know about that.
As we approach 2022 some employers will need new employees and have to be careful to avoid bad hires as they are costly.
A bad hire can manifest itself in any number of ways in an organisation and can make the whole company suffer. In this article, we will explore the true cost of a bad hire and red flags to avoid as you plan to hire new employees in the coming year.
What is a bad hire?
The term “bad hire” covers a lot of ground. In a nutshell, a bad hire is someone who fails to meet expectations, they can also be an employee whose behaviour negatively impacts morale, productivity, and key relationships to the business. A bad hire may bring conflict into the workplace, derail co-workers’ motivation and productivity, and create a genuine risk to the growth of your business.
A bad hire can cause direct and indirect problems that can plague the organisation for months or years if the issues are not addressed. Making a poor hiring decision can bring about costs associated with customers and sales lost, projects being held up or left unfinished, negative impact on your brand’s reputation, and legal fees. All the time spent on recruitment, training, and onboarding for each new hire is also lost.
How do you know if you have a bad hire on your team?
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In general, bad hires display some bad traits. A bad hire would not get along well with co-workers, and you will find that your team experiences much more conflict than usual if it is joined by a bad hire.
A bad hire can have a lasting negative impact on a company, poisoning your entire team by bringing everyone down with them. Bad hires are easy to detect, normally the new employee may not produce the quality of work needed or does not have the skills he or she claimed to have when they were interviewed.
Bad hires has persistent negative attitude
Every workplace has negative people who erode morale. They are not always easy to pick out of a team, but they can cause a shocking amount of damage over time. Nobody wants to deal with an employee who has a bad attitude.
But like a virus running in the background of a computer programme, their acidic personalities eat away at the goals and ultimately the bottom line of the company. If the person you brought on board is constantly complaining about the job, whining about their co-workers, or even disparaging your company, that is a big red flag that they are not a good fit for your company.
Negatively affecting company productivity
The repercussions of a bad hire often go beyond one individual’s job performance to the team or department they are assigned to. Often, a bad hire can cause repercussions that permeate throughout the entire organisation.
A single bad hire can wreak havoc on co-workers, affecting employee morale and productivity. If you start seeing an increase in missed deadlines or noticing an uptick in customer complaints, look at how a potentially bad hire could be responsible.
They are unwilling to adapt to new situations
Bad hires tend to reject or criticise any suggested changes in the business or suggestions for improvement. Hiring someone without the dedication or work ethic to pull their weight as part of a team means you have done a wrong hire. Indeed this can create bitterness, division in otherwise healthy teams and resultantly damage employee relationships.
Attracting and retaining top talent in your business can be difficult if there are employees who are unwilling to adapt to new situations and are poor performers.
It’s actually known that when one member of a team is constantly holding everyone else back, the rest of the team will soon become frustrated and decide that their skills could be better utilised elsewhere.
How hiring bad employee costs you
A bad hiring decision can cost you money in ways you did not even imagine. Filling a position with someone who ends up being a bad hire can have a ripple effect throughout your business in many ways, both financially and otherwise.
Before you take the onus to recruit on your own you should consider the potential effects of a bad hire to your organisation.
Lost clients and productivity
If an employee is not doing a good job, being as productive as expected, your customers may be dissatisfied and in the end customer attrition will set in.
Even if their work is done on time, if it is not of good quality, they may end up leaving you. One bad hire can lead to quite a few lost clients and this is the biggest problem with hiring the wrong person.
It is also important to note that bad hires may be lazy and unproductive, which may result in delays in attaining your goals.
You may have projects that have deadlines, but if all your employees are not committed and working together, you may miss deadlines and have to face dissatisfied clients.
The repercussions of a bad hire often go beyond an individual’s job performance. It affects the team or department they are assigned to. Often, a bad hire can have repercussions that permeate the entire organisation. A single bad hire can cause mayhem in the organisation, affecting employee morale and in productivity.
Recruitment and onboarding costs
Your organisation’s average cost per hire may include advertising expenses, recruiting events, recruitment software fees, relocation expenses, and more. Understanding how much it costs to recruit and onboard a new employee offers a better understanding of the real cost associated with new hires.
Whether it is the money you spend on recruiting that wrong hire or the extra money you will have to spend to find a replacement quickly, hiring costs can escalate. The effort and time a manager expends on interviewing replacements can result in lost revenue hence its very key to engage good hires.
How to handle and avoid hiring mistakes
The most cost-effective way to handle bad hires or difficult employees is to avoid hiring them in the first place. Hasty, ill-informed hiring decisions can often turn out badly. A thorough, professional recruiting and hiring process for new employees is the way to go.
Consider developing internal candidates
Internal candidates can reduce the time taken to fill a vacant position and scheduling interviews will be much easier since human resources can co-ordinate with the internal candidate during working hours.
Time can also be saved in other facets of the hiring process. For example, internal candidates may not need full interviews with every stakeholder and will also not need extensive background checks since the person is already local.
The onboarding process will be smoother for an internal candidate because they won’t need to learn the fundamentals of your organisation. They are familiar with the software, the hardware, and employees in your organisation.
Conduct pre-employment background checks
Background checks help businesses to verify the quality and qualifications of candidates during the hiring process. Everytime a business hires an employee, it is an investment in time, resources, and money hence it can be tempting to do background checks when you have found what looks like the perfect candidate for a role you need to urgently fill.
Most companies have their own unique set of requirements for conducting background checks but the primary goal is to have the most accurate overview of a candidate before the contract is signed and submitted.
While the perfect candidate might not exist, a thorough background check will probably get the organisation close as possible to one.
Make use of recruitment agencies
Recruiters or recruitment agencies find employees for companies seeking to hire. They act as a conduit between employees and companies. Companies seek their help because they are more likely to find high quality candidates faster, while allowing companies to focus on their core business. Using a recruitment agency increases your ability to engage high-quality candidates. The costs of a bad hire are high and varied, both monetary and non-monetary. To avoid bad hires, first it’s important to understand what a bad hire involves and the chaos it can cause, also you must learn to recognise red flags. This will help you to be better prepared to attract and retain the best employees for your company.
- Emmanuel Zvada is a human capital consultant and international recruitment expert
