3 Risks to Hiring New Staff, and How to Reduce Them

By Mark Wilkinson

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As the owner of a business, I’ve seen many faces come and go through our front doors.

It’s something that you’ve got to learn to live with as an employer, and you’ve got to know you’re taking a risk on every employee you hire.

Everything until they start the role is unknown, and you’ll never ever know what they’re truly going to be like until they settle in.

If I’m being real, I could tell a candidate every bit of information they would ever need to ace an interview.

The scary thing is that by utilising this information they could impress an interviewer so much and get the job through coaching rather than their own ability. This means that there’s still a huge risk they could be pretty poor at the role.

Plus, a lot of candidates use job opportunities as a stepping stone for other life goals or jobs, for example: funding their travel or starting up their own business.

It’s a risk, regardless, and here are the main worries.

Are they going to stay?

This is the biggest question.

Is the amount of time, resources and energy that you’re investing into one person really going to be worth it in the end?

Who knows?

You’re going to have to trust your judgment.

The scarier part is when you invest in a recruitment agency and pay thousands for one person, for them to be unfortunately poor at their job, or leave within a month or two.

Money. Down. The. Drain.

There are obviously some agencies that have rebates and refunds in place, but still, it doesn’t take the edge off the fact that you need someone to fill the role.

Are they going to be worth the investment?

Can you imagine going through the longest, tiresome recruitment campaign to finally find the one candidate that you think fits, and then for them to be absolutely shocked at the job?

You can imagine it, but don’t want to.

At least I don’t want to anyway.

It just makes it so difficult to put your trust in a candidate when the risk of them being terrible is so high.

A CV is not a trustworthy source.

Anyone can say anything about their previous experience, with the odd white lie or two here and there.

They may say they influenced sales positively by a 90% increase, yet they were just part of the team that actually achieved that and didn’t have much of an impact on it individually.

Dreadful, entirely dreadful.

Will they fit in with the current staff?

Even bigger than the two before, this person could be fantastic at their job and wholly worth the investment, until they work with the team.

There’s nothing worse than someone not fitting in with the company culture.

If someone dampens the office atmosphere then they’re going to start having a negative effect on other things too.

Work ethic drops, relationships fail, tension builds.

It’s all drama.

Drama that isn’t necessary.

And it’s a shame really, because it can lead to multiple people leaving the business which defeats the point of hiring the first person to begin with.

It’s a vicious circle if things go wrong in this department.

How to cope

Rest assured that recruitment doesn’t always pan out like this.

You really should trust your gut when it comes to hiring someone for your company as it tends to give the biggest indicator you’re going to get.

The best way to get around these problems is to communicate with the person often or even host a panel interview instead of facing them one-to-one.

You could even invite them out on social events and try to get them to engage with your team prior to committing to hiring them.

Or you could have them in on a trial run for a couple of days to see how well they perform – we’ve actually done this a few times with our apprentice staff.

The other option is to promote someone internally within the business and hire for a more junior role instead.

This way the fees tend to be less due to the salary difference and the availability of junior staff tends to be a lot vaster – not always, but it’s often the case.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately there’s always going to be a risk of recruiting someone brand new for a role.

But are you ever really going to achieve anything if you don’t take a chance?

Probably not.

There are definite ways you can reduce the risk of hiring a problematic candidate, and that’s by upping your recruitment game.

We’ve got loads of advice on how to do just that on our blog, so you might find it worthwhile heading over and having a browse.

Other than that, feel free to give us a call and we’ll happily talk to you about where you’re going wrong and how you can reduce your risk.

Recruitment really isn’t that bad.

Give it a go, let us know what you think, and relax.

Good luck!

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You might like these blog posts Why Your Business Needs Marketing Automation, 4 Factors to Consider When Selecting a Recruiter to Lead Your Search, Social Media Marketing - A Wake Up Call for Small Businesses, and Self-Assessment: The 5 Abilities Only HR Superheroes Have.

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