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Types of People to Avoid Hiring
SpotLite Insights
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The irony of running a professional staffing firm is that it's more challenging for me to find talent for our firm than it is to find talent for our clients. When a client calls us to fill an urgent need, we can usually turn around and find someone for them within 48 hours. So the natural assumption is that we should be able to do that for ourselves, but that’s not the case.
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The good thing about being human is that you can learn from your mistakes. From the mistakes I’ve made, I’ve learned that there are certain people who will hurt your company and just make your life plain miserable at work. Here are three types of people you need to avoid hiring at all costs:
1) The Debbie Downer
Nothing kills morale more than someone who is always negative and pessimistic. Every company goes through its ups and downs, but the more positive people you have on board, the easier it is to navigate through rough waters. You want people who’ll embrace challenges and look at things as half full instead of half empty. These individuals will make excuses and find acceptable reasons to fail. Whatever it is, it’s never their fault. They will try to convince you to expect a negative outcome more so than go out on a limb and shoot for the stars. You don’t need that. This breeds a losing mentality and culture.
The difficult part about hiring is that it’s hard to uncover these characteristics in a typical interview setting. You can spend a lot of time with these candidates to learn as much about them as possible and still not be able to see these traits right away. However, the instant they display any red flags pertaining to these characteristics, you should avoid them no matter how talented they seem to be. I’ve learned that talent alone can’t make up for these negative attributes. I’ve made the mistake of letting the allure of talent override the red flags and hired someone that my gut said not to hire because how talented I thought the individual was. Obviously I should have listened to my gut. Hiring is a combination of art and science, but sometimes, it's just better to listen to your gut!
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You're not going to hit a home run on every hire, but you definitely need to avoid striking out.
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This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times - Career Corner Column
You're not going to hit a home run on every hire, but you definitely need to avoid striking out.