Last Updated on Apr 7, 2020 by James W
As a business leader, hiring people is something that you think about practically every week. How can you get the right people into your business to help it grow? The answers aren’t always clear-cut. But there’s a definite delineation between companies who get it right and those that get it horribly wrong.
Here are some red flags that indicate that there might be something wrong with how you’re hiring.
You’ve Got A Poor Showing On Glassdoor
It turns out that the employee-employer relationship isn’t as one-sided as many employers think. Workers shop around for jobs just as much as employers shop around for workers. This, of course, has always happened in the past, but the difference today is that visibility is much higher. Review sites like Glassdoor have changed the balance of power back in favor of workers. It’s not possible for them to read about the experience of other people who have been through your company. According to research by Glassdoor themselves, around 46 percent of employees read a review on their site about their potential future employer when considering to take the job. On top of that, 69 percent of workers said that they would not take a job with a company with a bad reputation.
If you’ve got a bad score on Glassdoor, you need to start thinking about what to do. You could potentially be turning off more than a third of all your potential applicants, an unacceptably high number.
The first thing to do is to make sure that you’re getting basics right, like health and safety, as well as workers compensation insurance, just in case somebody injures themselves at your premises. The next is to ensure that there’s not something terribly wrong with your management practices and that the low scores on Glassdoor are indeed to do with the employees themselves. Are employees just bad? Or have they been managed in the wrong way?
Finally, investigate your interview processes. Often poor Glassdoor scores result from not asking the right questions at interview and getting the right type of people for your company. Perhaps you keep hiring one personality type when the culture at your firm demands another. Consistently hiring the wrong people to your team is an indication that you have a problem with how you conduct your onboarding and may damage your online reputation.
You Only Focus On Technical Skills
There’s an old adage in business: technical skills can be learned but personality can’t. This is why so many modern companies are starting to focus on soft skills: aspects of a person’s personality that makes them easier to work with and more productive. Arch entrepreneur, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, says that in the past he used to hire people based on technical skill alone. But he realized over time that this wasn’t actually the best policy. Yes, people have to be good at what they do, but they also need to be capable of working in a team.
As machines automate more and more technical tasks, like accounting, social intelligence is becoming the scarce commodity that companies need. Hence, hiring on technical excellence alone is a serious red flag.
