Reboot Hiring

4Articulating the Need

The costs associated with a bad hire have been identified in a Recruitment & Employment Confederation UK survey.¹ The top three costs are the time and money spent on training the employee (53%), the negative impact on employee morale and performance (46%), and the time and money spent in the hiring process (41%). These are closely followed by a general loss of productivity (36%), harm to the business's reputation (24%), financial loss (23%), and increased staff turnover (21%). It was also found that spending inadequate time reviewing the need, creating a misleading job profile, or focusing on competencies instead of potential were common mistakes leading to a bad hire.

Working out and successfully articulating who you genuinely need to recruit can be challenging. But getting it wrong is the crux of most failed recruitment, worsened if you don't have a strong talent acquisition partner to challenge assumptions and coax the information out of you. This chapter will help you explain to your hiring partner – to the best of your ability – who you need to hire to help you avoid these costs and so you also save time and hassle.

You might be a new manager who has never hired someone before and doesn't know where to start. You could be a senior leader who once believed “I'll know it when I see it” was an acceptable and fair way to hire but now wants to deliver a better experience for people. You might simply be too time‐poor to give this extended thought and ...