4 Signs You Are About to Make a Hiring Mistake

Hi, I’m Uriah from Productive Therapist, and this is “4 Signs You Are About to Make a Hiring Mistake.” So, if you have any experience with hiring, whether it be a clinician for your group practice, or an assistant for an admin role, you’ve probably made at least one of these mistakes. They can be frustrating and costly, so it’s good to get better at this process! This is going to be a short episode with some quick tips, but I know that you’ll find something useful here.

So, the first one is: you’re trying to rationalize and convince yourself why you should hire the person.

This is almost always a mistake because there’s something inside of you, your intuition, that knows there’s something that’s not right. So, if you are trying to talk yourself into it, if you’re trying to talk your partner into it, or your business partner, or anybody else in your life, then that’s a sure sign that something is not quite right and you should probably not hire that person.

Number two: you’re hesitant and just not really excited, but you’re still considering hiring them.

So, you might not be trying to rationalize it necessarily, but you know that it’s not 100% slam dunk, “this person is amazing.”

So, whenever I’m hiring for any role in my business, I want to have the feeling of genuine concern about what will happen to my business if I do not hire this person because they are so awesome. I want to be pumped; I want to be excited and not hesitant at all. So that’s number two.

Number three, you’ve fallen in love with an applicant and you are blinded to their shortcomings.

This is so easy to do and I’ve done it several times! So, for whatever reason, whether it’s their experience, or their training, or something else, something about them is just very, very interesting or attractive to you. Maybe they’re the kind of person that you love to be friends with or have as a colleague, or any number of things that would cause you to ignore the other signs, like I said before, and then go ahead and hire them.

I’ve done this a couple of times and it just always turned out to be a mistake.

Lastly, number four, you’re getting too excited and skipping steps in your perfectly crafted hiring process.

Even if your hiring process is not perfectly crafted, you’re going faster than usual.

So, this might be because you’ve fallen in love with them for some reason, but it could be for some other reason as well. And so if you find that in the first interview, whether it’s a phone interview or in person, or on Zoom, that you are making them a job offer right there instead of, say, checking the references, doing background check, etc., whatever other steps in your process are there, that’s probably a cue to you that you’re moving a little too fast and you should probably slow things down, sleep on it, consult with people that you need to consult with, and make sure you take the time to make a really good hiring decision.

The advice that I’ve heard before, and you’ve probably heard this before, is hire slow and fire fast. And it really does make a lot of sense.

So, these are the first signs that you’re about to make hiring mistake:

  1. You’re trying to rationalize and convince yourself why you should hire them.
  2. You might be hesitant and not just super excited.
  3. You’ve fallen in love with them and you’re not looking at all the factors.
  4. You’re just getting too excited and skipping steps in your hiring process.

I hope you found that helpful. And this information here is actually part of a bigger course called “Hiring Your Assistant” that we’re going to finish up here in about the next month or two.

Thanks for listening and have a great day.


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