Sometimes, the best hiring decisions are the candidates you decline

Sometimes, the best hiring decisions are the candidates you decline. 

In today’s world, quality resources are becoming rarer and rarer. For this reason, it’s always tempting to hire the first candidate who seems qualified for a position, but at what cost? 

If we go back to just 10 years ago, companies were still making lots of hiring mistakes, even with a flooded pool of quality candidates. These hiring mistakes cost companies a fortune. So you can only imagine how badly recruitment is going in 2022. 

Back in 2005, I remember looking through a book about recruitment, and something I read left me speechless. Actually, I had a hard time believing it until I took some time to think about it in relation to my own company. Basically, what I read was a statistic that said that for every bad hire they make, a company loses about a million dollars. It sounds crazy, right? It didn’t take me long to realize that it was true. 

If you start thinking about it, a bad hire might: 

• Prevent you from landing a big client
• Cost you a key employee
• Cause further client attrition because of the lost key employee
• Force you to refund a client
• Cause you to get sued
• And so on

This might sound drastic, but most of these examples have happened within our company as the result of a bad hire. 

Let me clarify. By “bad hire”, I don’t mean necessarily that the employee was bad or unqualified. I simply mean that in most cases, it was a poor fit for both the employee and our company, and something we should have been able to spot. 

So in conclusion, even if you’re being pressed to fill a position, and even though (maybe you’re a recruiter), you won’t need to work with this person daily, you should always hire carefully.