Have you ever left a position open because you were too anxious to hire someone new?
It’s a common problem, usually stoked by a bad experience with a previous employee. And it’s not without merit.

Hiring the wrong employee can do serious short and long term damage to your company.

Here are four destructive kinds of people you could unfortunately hire, and the harm they will inflict:

• Bad Apple. A dysfunctional employee can wreck your peaceful, productive culture through gossip, complaining, being uncooperative, overly competitive, or just plain mean.
• Break-takers Anonymous. Some workers take more breaks than they do work. Social media and smartphone addictions are only the most recent expression of workplace laziness and unproductivity. Breaking your focus every five minutes to screw around on Instagram annihilates your long term output.
• Question Authority? Some workers mistrust you simply because you’re in charge. They question all your motives, complain about directives, and just generally resent being told what to do. An employee who can’t handle taking orders is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
• Invisible Man. This is the person who seems great, but once hired, they miss tons of work, with a different reason every time.

The risks of hiring the wrong person are very real.

The problem is, if you let this fear cause you to avoid hiring at all, it will force your remaining staff to pick up extra tasks to “share the load.” More stress and more burnout will surely result, and in the end you’ll drive away some of your best people.

But you want to grow. You have tasks that need to be done.
So what can you do?

5 Ways to Overcome the Fear of Hiring

The battle against hire-o-phobia is won on the front end, in the interview process. Here are five ways you can weed out the bad apples and productivity-killers:

1. Interview better.
Sounds obvious, but so many companies have fear-based interview policies. For instance, some places require that every candidate gets asked the exact same questions – word for word – with no follow-up questions allowed. It’s a terrible approach. So much about a person goes unexamined and unrevealed through this kind of approach.

Why do companies use these methods? They’re afraid of being sued for some kind of bias or discrimination. But interviewing is a valuable skill, more like an art. Don’t stifle the artist.

“But wait,” you might be thinking: Isn’t the fear of being sued justified? Yes, but only if you’re interviewing the wrong people, which leads to the next strategy…

2. Screen Out People Who are Only Qualified On Paper
Pre-screening your candidates with resumes is easy, and not very helpful. But pre-screening with skill, aptitude, and personality testing – this is immensely valuable.

Anyone can look good on paper. Some people even make up college degrees they haven’t earned, hoping you won’t take the time to check (which you probably won’t). But high-quality pre-employment testing shows what people can really do, and what they’re really like.

Pre-testing – used by hardly any recruiters and few employers – is the single best way to improve the quality of the pool.

3. Check references
Easier said than done. And this too is an interview. It takes skill to extract what you really need to know from a reference. It also takes time. Which is why this is an often neglected part of the hiring process.

4. Expand the Pool
No, your network isn’t enough. Neither is a want-ad on Craig’s List. There are many more places online and offline to find quality candidates. You need to make your job known to more people in more places.

5. Find People Not Actively Job-Searching
Some of your best candidates aren’t even looking. But if you can offer them something more attractive than their current job (sometimes all you need is a better location!), you can find top quality talent that’s already proven itself.

Need Help Doing Any of These?

When you work with PainLess Hire, we do all five of these for you.

We post your job in way more places than you have time for, find already-employed job candidates, use super-effective pre-testing, conduct 1st round phone interviews, and check references.

Our process whittles your list down to just a handful of final candidates – all of them high quality people you will be unafraid to hire.

Then, you just do one round of interviews, and choose your champion.

Overcome the fear of hiring. Make it PainLess!