Common Hiring Mistakes Worth Avoiding To Foster A Great Company Culture

If you want to establish a solid company culture, you want to focus on such a thing from the very beginning. But if you haven’t had an initial focus geared around establishing strong corporate culture, don’t worry. There are strategies out there which can help you alter existing practices to maximize your company vision and overall potential.

There are a lot of things to consider as you go about ironing out such a strategy—are you going with any remote options? You’ll want the right kind of employees. You don’t want to find yourself in a position where it seems evident that employees have reduced productivity. Additionally, you don’t want employees that prove themselves an operational drain.

Hiring practices should have potential future costs informing them. It’s essential that you look at employees as a long-term investment. Ideally, you’ll maximize what you spend on them before they either quit, or you’re forced to let them go – in which case you should look into redundancy pay for them. Keep in mind it’s important you apply such strategy across the board; you don’t want some “Maverick” gumming up the works.

If you’ve got a few “bad apples”, as it were, on your staff, you’re going to find that their impact on company culture may be impossible to reduce while they’re still employed with you. Alliances will be formed, and sometimes even those in management will come to side with the wrong employee for varying reasons. Have you ever heard the phrase: “He couldn’t see the forest for the trees”? Well, sometimes a bad employee will distract leadership from the endgame through charisma or guile. That’s something hard to predict!

Employment History

First and foremost, you want to ask the right questions of the right people. With the millennial crowd, you’re likely to find that history of employment among prospective team members is long, but length of employment isn’t. Many employers define millennial employment as an average which is between three and six months.

A good rule of thumb here is to hire among millennials who have managed to serve an employer longer than six months. But that’s not your only rubric. Additionally, you want to contact previous employers to get an idea of the candidate’s personality, and their effect among other workers.

For example, a healthy young lady who is personable may seem like a great hire for the sales division, until you discover she tried to flirt with those in management at her previous job as a means of climbing the company ladder. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. However, looks and resume alone won’t reveal this; you must ask around.

Collegiate Considerations

A college degree doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. Employment history is in some cases a stronger indicator. But you can tell a lot in terms of personality, too. Ask probing questions that are designed to evoke answers as they pertain to your business’s cultural aims. Also, you might test them obliquely through introducing them to internal software.

Generally, collegiate institutions don’t keep students up on the latest software trends. You might have them use internal solutions like this to see how they handle it right off the bat.

Figuring Potential Hires Out

One of your wisest courses of action in finding the right employee will be looking at multiple applicants. You should expect a potential employee to put their best foot forward in a given interview. This means you can’t trust them. They’re going to try to say what you want to hear. If they don’t say what you want to hear, this either indicates honesty—generally a sought quality—or aloofness; something less attractive for most jobs. See what fits with your company culture.

In order to get past what they want to portray as their personality, you want to force them into a position where collaterally you are able to tell things about them. For example, if you’re trying to hire a salesperson, you might at some point look them in the eye and tell them they didn’t get the job.

If they don’t immediately try to sell themselves to you all the harder, they may not be the kind of seller you need. Different jobs will have different “tricks” of this kind which can help you reveal the true person hiding behind the façade of a hopeful employee.

Something else you might do involves testing a potential employee’s ability to function independently. Have potential employees fill out a psychological test for you during the interview using a touchscreen phone. This could tell you in an instant whether or not they’ve got what it takes to do things remotely—depending on your business, of course.

Finding The Right Employees

When you can test employees obliquely, and you hire the right ones from the start, you’re more likely to establish a corporate / company culture that fits both the potential and vision of your company. Ultimately this establishes greater financial stability over the long-term and is an essential means of approaching the hiring process.