Hiring Training

Top Four Hiring Mistakes

Every bad hire has a story that starts the same way: “I had a feeling…”

“Every time I hire someone new, I have this pit in my stomach. I’m waiting to find out if it actually pans out. It does about 50% of the time. I’m always thinking I make another mistake?”

“She was great for about a week and then little things kept popping up that just didn’t feel right. I ignored it because I desperately needed her to work out. Now I don’t know what to do.”

“The worst thing about it? He dragged down two of my best employees for a few months before I accepted the loss. What a mess that was.”

“Whenever I have to stop what I’m doing and hire another person, I feel like I’m playing a high-stakes game of craps. Finding the right people just isn’t my strong suit.”

Sound familiar? These aren’t outliers—they’re the norm. And they point to the same four breakdowns.

  1. Going it Alone | THE Unconventional Hiring Team™
    Having too few perspectives in the room. When hiring processes rest on one or two people, blind spots become hiring mistakes. One person can make the decision but with the perspectives of a rounded group you’ll cover all your blind spots.
  2. Muddy Expectations | THE Right Fit™
    Not having a shared picture of what “right” actually looks like. If your hiring team can’t articulate the same priorities, you’ll each be evaluating different characteristics and skills.
  3. Judging Acting not Reality | THE Obstacle Course™ 
    Your process lets candidates perform instead of reveal. Standard hiring processes reward polish. They don’t surface how someone actually thinks, collaborates, or handles pressure. You are hiring the highlight real, not the human.
  4. Ruled by Hunches | THE Proof™
    You’re making gut calls at the finish line anyway. After all that work, the final decision often comes down to “I just liked them.” That’s not a strategy—it’s a hire-wire act.

If hiring makes you anxious, you’re hitting at least one of these walls.

What Happens When You Fix This?

The Hire Effect™ system for hiring is a framework. You tailor it so the process is built around your culture, your team, and your actual needs, not an HR checklist borrowed from someone else’s company.

The result? You get as close as possible to eliminating all four mistakes. Not through luck. Through design.

Mistake #1 – Going it Alone

THE Unconventional Hiring Team™

Here’s the hard truth: a hiring decision made solo (or even as a duo) is a decision made in the dark. You can’t see your own blind spots, that’s what makes them blind spots! Get more perspectives about candidates from others and those pesky blind spots are taken care of; those others are people that care about you and your business. They are vested in your success. You’ll just have to show them how they can help! (There’s a little foreshadowing. :)) You’ll choose more wisely in the end.

We call this well rounded, perspective full solution THE (The Hire Effect™) Unconventional Hiring Team.

Even small companies have people vested in their success who aren’t formally part of the business. (Another business owner. An advisor. An intuitive person. An investor.) There are a lot of people who could help! Bring them in. You’ll broaden your perspectives on the candidates and they will build their professional skills while you are deepening your relationship with them. Think about it. If you invite another employee who isn’t in HR to participate, ultimately, regardless of who they were part of choosing, they’ll want that new employee to succeed! Everyone will win. How cool is that?!

Our rule of thumb? Fewer than three perspectives on your team leaves you dangerously exposed to your own assumptions and biases.

Our system clarifies:

Who to ask to be on the hiring team and show them how they can help

What each person’s role is on the team

What processes they need to coordinate with one another

How to extract the most useful information possible

All this without putting the final decision in anyone else’s hands. You stay in control. You just stop flying blind.

One juicy tidbit:

If you’re hiring for your sales team, invite your best customer into the process. They’ll likely be honored you asked, and who would know better how they like to be sold your products or services? An exceptional perspective to get, for sure.

How’s that for unconventional? 

You can learn more about THE Unconventional Hiring Team in our book, on the Blog or just talk with us!

Mistake #2 – Muddy Expectations

THE Right Fit™

To get the most from multiple perspectives, you need a shared story, a clear picture of what “right” actually looks like. We call it THE Right Fit, a clear articulation of the culture and skills you want to add to the team. Get everyone looking for the same things. So you are looking for a culture fit AND the critical skills you need.

Don’t know how to define your culture? That’s okay.

Here’s an easy, actionable way to get there:

1. What do you and your team care about? What drives everyday decisions and actions?

  • Our customers come first.
  • Our processes and outcomes are all “green.”
  • Safety comes first.
  • We make the most of our resources.

2. What’s the mood of the work? What qualities are present as your team does the work?

  • High collaboration
  • Creative
  • Thorough
  • Messy but focused
  • Friendly

Once you can articulate your culture, you can actually see whether someone fits, instead of just hoping they do.

Now for skills.

Most companies are pretty clear about the skills they need. Continue to test and look for those critical skills.

Here’s a small tweak that makes a big difference: you look for skill capability AND evaluate candidates to see if they get it, and most importantly, want it!

It, of course, is the job. Get everyone on your hiring team working from the same page, and suddenly you’re not guessing, you’re fit-ting the pieces together.

Mistake #3 – Judging Acting not Reality

THE Obstacle Course™

Let’s be honest about how most small businesses hire: skim applications with a disjointed sense of what you need, run a few interviews that feel productive, then go with your gut anyway.

Even companies with HR departments often end up in a similar place, going through the motions without ever getting a real sense of who someone actually is before hiring them.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: people who are great at being interviewed are often terrible hires. They’ve mastered the performance. Your job is to see past their acting to see the real person underneath. The Obstacle CourseTM allows you to see the real human not the act they are putting on to get the job.

THE Obstacle Course™

Our solution is designed to strip away the polish and reveal the person. It gathers objective data across multiple touchpoints so you’re evaluating behavior, not just presentation. You’ll need to learn how to design an obstacle course for every hiring initiative, but you can do it! We believe in you. 🙂

Every obstacle course has two components:

Interactions with the hiring team (calls, interviews, panel interviews, walkthroughs…)

Assignments that require candidates to do something real so you can observe them

In our experience, it takes no fewer than three interactions and three assignments to get a clear picture of who the candidate is. Fewer than that, and you’re still guessing.

What’s an assignment?

Assignments get candidates to behave, not just talk. You’re observing them doing something.

  • Making and keeping a commitment
  • Writing a social media post on the spot
  • Threading a needle on a sewing machine
  • Be compelling and sell something.

The Hire Effect™ | Hire for Culture and Skill walks you through how to design assignments, it’s a skill to design these too.

One of the hard parts? Staying the course.

It takes courage, and time, to put every candidate through the full obstacle course. You’ll be tempted to skip steps. You’ll want to fast-track the one who “just feels right.”

Don’t.

The antidote to rushing is getting so good at the process that it becomes second nature, faster because you’re skilled, not because you cut corners.

And one more thing: don’t let some candidates charm their way around the process while others go through every hoop. If you are the “boss” you might want to pull rank and do that.

Don’t!

That’s how great actors slip through and great hires get overlooked.

Design your obstacle course to reveal behavior against what you’re really looking for (THE Right FitTM) and hold everyone to it. No shortcuts. No starring roles for smooth talkers.

Central to interactions with your team are conducting great interviews. That’s a skill too. Perhaps you’d like to start there and see what it actually takes to do this. If so, just get in touch and we’d be happy to show you our Interview Skills Workshop.

Mistake #4 – Ruled by Hunches

THE Proof™

Don’t trust your gut; prove it. Most hiring “decisions” are really just gut reactions wearing a professional mask. You or someone on your hiring team like someone. You hope this candidate’s the one. You tell yourself you just know. But do you?

With a few simple systems in place, you can actually test your intuition, find out whether it’s insight or impulse. Often, what feels like a strong instinct is really just distraction, bias, or plain decision fatigue. (You’re busy. We get it.)

Truthfully, most people learn how to hire by trial and error. Trial-by-fire hiring is incredibly expensive. Studies show a bad hire can cost up to 2.5 times the person’s annual salary, and that’s before you count the emotional wear and tear on your team.

THE Proof™

This is where we separate guesswork from groundwork.

Using what we’ve already defined with THE Right FitTM, THE ProofTM process turns “I think” into “I can show you why.” A great thing for your hiring team to know and discuss!

For every candidate interaction, each hiring team member evaluates how well the person aligns with THE Right Fit (not by comparing them to other candidates) and notes the specific things they saw or heard that support that assessment.

Do this consistently, and patterns start to emerge. You’ll see exactly how well someone aligns with your culture and the skills you need and where they’ll need coaching or development if you choose to hire them.

The Payoff

Yes, it takes courage (and a some patience) to resist the instant thumbs‑up/thumbs‑down reflex. But stick with THE Proof™, and you’ll literally see your decision taking shape in front of you.

No hunches. No hindsight. Just clarity.

So ask yourself:

  • How well are you encouraging your hiring team to recognize their biases and look through them?
  • How often do you verify your gut before betting on it?
  • How clear is your picture of what a new hire will need to succeed?
  • How confident are you that your “yes” truly means yes?

If your answers made you think twice, well then good! That’s where better hiring begins.

Conclusion

Ways to Work With Us

Read the book

Learn the full methodology and adapt it yourself (it’s $12)

Get coaching

We’ll help you through the tough spots in tailoring and implementing your process so you can run it on your own.

Online Learning Modules

You can engage with our online learning modules and get coaching in the process.

Go full partnership.

Together, we’ll build your Unconventional Hiring team, build your Right Fit, design a seamless Obstacle Course, and train everyone to spot and secure the right person with Proof. By the end, your team won’t just make a great hire, they’ll have the skills to do it again and again without us. Our goal? To make ourselves delightfully dispensable.

Feel free to reach out and talk to us about what might be best for you. 🙂

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