A lot of work can go into finding and hiring the best people for your organization, as any beleaguered human resources professional can attest. However, hard work is required in all cases – there are no shortcuts to making great hires. No successful company is going to rely on blind luck and wishful thinking when it comes to adding new employees to their roster. In fact, bad hires will cost you plenty, according to a recent report in Quartz.
Approximately 60 percent of employers throughout the world have indicated that they made a bad hire last year, notes a recently released CareeerBuilder survey of 6,000-plus hiring managers and human resources personnel.
The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive. It shows that a large proportion of companies reporting that they hired employees who wound up performing poorly or were otherwise a bad fit are located in Russia (88 percent), Brazil (87 percent) and China (87 percent).
The percentage in the United States is about 66 percent, the same amount as in Italy. Bad hiring numbers are a little better in the UK, where 62 percent of managers reported they wound up with problematic employees, followed by 59 percent in Japan, 58 percent in Germany and just 53 percent in France. The report did not indicate how many of these bad hires had already been fired.
One reason for the large percentage of bad hires in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) was because companies in these highly competitive, emerging markets are scrambling to hire from a smaller pool of qualified candidates.
HR professionals cited a rush to fill the job as being the main reason for making hiring mistakes. The second biggest reason was what the survey called “insufficient talent intelligence.”
The negative results of these bad hires include a reduction in employee morale, poor relations with clients, dwindling sales and increased costs to hire new workers. Most companies pointed to losses in productivity because of their poor hiring choices.
Some 29 percent of human resources managers in India indicated that their bad hires wound up costing them at least $37,150, while their counterparts in China said their loss was $8,734. About 25 percent of American managers reported that the cost of a bad hire is more than $50,000.
Given the fact that bad hires will typically lead to your company losing a lot of time, money and effort, it’s prudent to make sure your HR department exercises due diligence when searching for, qualifying and recruiting new employees. In the long run, it’s better to do the work up front and make sure you are hiring the best people, rather than working harder to clean up after the mess that’s left from hiring under performing workers.
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