Building the right team for your company can be a long and arduous task. It takes a lot of patience and business savvy to get the right people for the job. When you find the right employee, it adds tremendous value to your workforce and your company. Unfortunately, when you hire the wrong candidate, it can drain your productivity, time, and budget. Here are some examples of how employees can affect company profits.
Define the Job
If you wish to hire a team for your business, you must first define the different job positions, establish the position’s duties, and construct a candidate profile. The candidate profile should describe what type of person would be suited to the role – what skills, experience, and personality traits would be most advantageous.
Decide Who to Interview
Before the interview process, you can look at the curriculum vitae of applicants and ask to interview those who have the required skills. During the interview, you can get a feel for the person and ask them more personality-related questions.
A useful tool to gain more insight into interviewees’ personalities is to ask them to complete a personality assessment such as the Career Personality Test. Such a test can give you an insight into people’s strengths and weaknesses and how they might react in certain situations. Having this information will help you match a person to your vacancy. For example, if you are looking to recruit a medical nurse to your team, you might favor an ISFJ Personality Type. According to the Myers-Briggs test, an ISFJ personality type is Introverted, Observant, Feeling, and Judging. Such a person tends to be warm and unassuming in their own steady way. They’re efficient and responsible, giving careful attention to practical details in their daily lives.
What Happens If You Get It Wrong?
Sometimes you might hire the wrong person for the job. You may have read them wrong; they may have been deceitful at the interview or on their CV. Whatever the reason, if you hire a person who isn’t suitable for the position, the consequences can have a knock-on effect.
It can cost a company a lot of time and money to hire staff. When you bring a new employee into your company, you spend considerable time and money to get them up to speed. The whole recruitment process of interviewing, screening, and making offers to candidates uses resources that are never replaced. Once the person takes up the position, more expenses are involved. These expenses include training hours that could have been devoted elsewhere and salaries paid to the trainers.
Effect on the Team
An inefficient employee can have a disastrous effect on a strong team and productivity. The rest of the team has to compensate for the employee’s shortcomings if their work is substandard and needs to take on additional responsibilities, which leads to a loss of efficiency and heightens employee dissatisfaction.
If the employee has a personality trait that causes conflict within the team and cannot be a decent team member, the team will suffer, and so will productivity. Time is wasted trying to resolve disputes; staff members will begin to hate work, so absences increase, and so do resignations.
The emotional responses of staff across each department can have a knock-on effect across the business. Staff members’ moods can affect morale and lead to a more toxic – or more productive – work environment.
Effect on Customers
A person who is not suitable for a job position may have a detrimental effect on customers. They may mistreat the customers by being rude or unhelpful. Customers will be offended and may escalate the case or bad mouth your company, which will result in your business gaining a bad reputation, leading to a decrease in sales.
An employee might not be rude, but if they are incompetent at their job, they could make lots of mistakes, produce inferior products or provide a low quality of service.
An employee who fits the job well will be happy, contented, and confident in their abilities. Satisfied employees mean improved productivity and increased profits. Whether working for entrepreneurial start-ups or large, established enterprises, the same holds true: People are more productive and creative when they have more positive emotions. A harmonious team will work together like a well-oiled machine.
Solutions
If you want to avoid losing money on hiring the wrong employee, ensure you spend time constructing a clear job description and candidate profile. Properly vet prospective employees and consider implementing a trial period. Doing so will mean that the employment contract can be terminated after a set time without consequence if either party is not happy. This will avoid high severance pay-outs.
