Turnover in any position costs you real money. Turnover of good people leaving because they don’t want to work with your bad hires costs you even more.
Nationally about 50 percent of new hires fail. Of those who succeed, only about 20 percent are top performers. But about 90 percent of failures are unrelated to brains and technical skills.
The cost of a bad hire might be up to two times the person’s annual salary and benefits until you fire them or they leave. How much you lose depends on how awful they are — and how much time, money and productivity is flushed away in the meantime. Then add another two to 2.5 times their salary costs to replace them.
Turnover in any position costs you real money. Turnover of good people leaving because they don’t want to work with your bad hires costs you even more.
We now know that EQ (Emotional Quotient/Intelligence) is far more important for success in most jobs and definitely critical for success within leadership roles.
Still, we continue to hire and promote people, including leaders, largely on IQ and technical skill sets. “The best salesperson will surely be the best leader of other salespersons, right?” Wrong!
It is mind-boggling, and it just gets dumber and dumber. We keep getting the same lousy results and yet we have not substantively changed the hiring practices in most organizations. I believe Albert Einstein had something clever to say about this phenomenon being related to insanity.
Whatever methods (legal and ethical, of course) you use, you need to discover at least these six key characteristics about your candidates before you hire:
•A ttitude: Is theirs one of abundance and can-do, or scarcity and focused on obstacles?
• B rains: Can they do the job or learn quickly how to do the job?
• C haracter: What are their core personal values?
• D rive: Are they self-motivated to achieve their goals and yours?
• E xperience: What have they done in the past that prepares them, or makes them ready, for what you want them to do now?
• F it: Will they truly FIT into your culture, your organizational values, help you accomplish your mission and advance your vision?
If you said “no” or “I can’t tell,” to even one of these questions about the candidate, do not hire that person. Seriously — don’t do it!
Trust the answers to your ABCDEF questions and trust your G-U-T. If the person doesn’t feel right to you or others, he/she probably isn’t right. It’s rarely, if ever, worth the risk to you and your team to risk investing in a hire that doesn’t hit on all six cylinders.