Did You Hire for the Right Things?

Six months ago, you hired someone. They’ve settled in, they’re doing the job and you’ve had a chance to see what they’re good at, where they’ve needed help and what they bring to the team.

So here’s an interesting question: did you hire them for the right things?

Perhaps you insisted on five years’ experience and discovered that three would have been plenty. Perhaps sector experience really did matter. The qualification listed as essential may have barely featured in the job, while the person you nearly rejected because they didn’t quite fit the profile has turned out to be brilliant. Or somebody who interviewed exceptionally well may have struggled with parts of the actual work.

Every hire tells us something about the assumptions we made when we recruited them. The question is whether we pay attention.

We Make Lots of Assumptions When We Hire

Recruitment is inevitably a decision made with incomplete information. We write a job description, decide what experience somebody needs, identify skills and qualifications, choose interview questions and perhaps assessments. Then we use the evidence available to decide who appears most likely to succeed.

Some of those signals will be useful. Some won’t. The problem is that we don’t necessarily go back and find out which was which.

Recent research from the CIPD gives us an indication of the scale of the problem. Its survey of 1,014 UK HR and people professionals found that 31% of organisations track time to hire and 33% collect data about candidate experience. Around 30% measure the performance or retention of new hires during their first year, but only 7% examine whether their assessment methods predicted later success.

That’s quite a gap. We spend considerable time deciding what evidence to use when hiring someone, but relatively little time checking whether that evidence turned out to be useful.

Then Reality Gives Us More Evidence

Once somebody starts doing the job, many of our assumptions begin to get tested. The experience we thought was essential either proves useful or it doesn’t. The strengths we thought we saw at interview start appearing in the work, while capabilities we barely considered during recruitment can suddenly turn out to be important.

The person themselves learns things too. They discover whether the role resembles the one they were offered, whether the culture described during recruitment exists in practice, and whether the promised flexibility, development and autonomy are real.

None of this gives us a perfect measure of whether we made a good hiring decision. A capable employee can struggle because their onboarding was poor. Someone can leave because their manager changed, the organisation reorganised or the role wasn’t what they were promised. Another person can stay for years without necessarily making the contribution everyone hoped for. Context matters, but there is still plenty to learn.

Imagine discovering that several of your strongest employees succeeded despite lacking the sector experience you normally require. Would you still make it essential? If people who perform brilliantly at interview regularly take longer to become effective than candidates who appear less polished, what might that tell you about your interviews? And if new employees repeatedly tell you that the job is different from the one described during recruitment, the problem may begin before selection.

Every appointment generates evidence about the signals we used to make it. That evidence has value only if somebody looks at it.

Go Back and Look at Your Last Hire

This doesn’t require an elaborate HR analytics system. Take somebody you hired six months ago and pull out the original job description and selection criteria.

Start with two questions: what did we think would matter, and what actually mattered?

Look at which experience has proved useful, which capabilities have helped the person contribute and what you insisted upon that has turned out to be largely irrelevant. Consider the strengths that have emerged which you didn’t really explore during recruitment, and whether what you told the person about the opportunity turned out to be accurate.

Then ask the question that really matters: knowing what we know now, would we recruit for this role differently?

The new employee should be part of that conversation. They can tell you which parts of the recruitment process helped them understand the opportunity, what surprised them after joining and what information would have helped them make a better decision themselves.

You could have that conversation after 30, 90 and 180 days. The timing matters less than creating the habit and feeding what you’ve learned back into the next job description, the next set of selection criteria and the next interview.

Perhaps something you considered essential becomes desirable. A favourite interview question might disappear because you’ve realised it tells you very little. You might start looking for a strength that your best people consistently demonstrate but you’ve never deliberately recruited for, or describe the opportunity differently because you’ve learned what the job is actually like.

Small changes accumulate.

Every Hire Should Teach You Something

There is a temptation to treat recruitment as finished when somebody accepts the offer. The vacancy has been filled, the recruiter moves on, the hiring manager starts onboarding and everyone’s attention shifts to what comes next.

But this is precisely when some of the best evidence about the hiring decision starts to appear.

You don’t need to reduce people to performance scores or pretend that every outcome can be traced back to recruitment. You just need to remain curious about what you got right, what you got wrong, what surprised you and what you should do differently next time.

A hiring process should become more intelligent every time somebody joins.

Did yours?