Why Small Business Owners Make Bad Hiring Decisions
By Minesh Baxi
If you are a small business owner, quite often you are the only person who is making the hiring decisions. It is up to you to define job descriptions, collect resumes, interview and then decide who will be the best fit for the positions you need filled.
Obviously, all of this is over and above the daily requirements that you face to gain clients, manage the resources and make sure you are profitable. Doesn’t it sound like a daunting task?
You have to be superhuman!
Quite often hiring comes across as an activity that does not need as much attention as possibly, courting a new client. With the never-ending list of things to be done, it is understandable as well.
Here are 5 reasons why small business owners fail to make good hiring decisions:
Lack of time: The business owner is swamped as discussed above and is unable to take the time to make sure that he is making the best hiring decision.
Needs a body right now: Typically a small business owner does not have enough back-up staff to handles tasks within the organization if an employee leaves. This creates a crisis and the employer is forced to make decisions too quickly. As you know – haste makes waste.
Too emotionally close to the decision: Due to lack of enough people to help make a hiring decision, the employer is the key decision maker and maybe, the only decision maker. Unfortunately this puts the employer too close to the candidate and the process of hiring. Hence the employer may make decisions which are more based on emotion than information.
No formal training in hiring: Hiring seems to be almost like an additional, unwanted and unimportant task which befalls a manager. So very few employers go through enough training to understand the intricacies of hiring.
Lack of funds: The employer is usually working with a limited budget and sacrifices getting hiring support from a consultant, background checks, use of assessments and proper legal counsel and ends up hiring a candidate that may have shown up as a problem employee if a more detailed investigation had taken place.
About the Author: Minesh Baxi is the co-author of “Stop Hiring Losers” and you can download free one hour audio overview of the book at http://www.StopHiringLosers.com