Top 5 Mistakes To Avoid When Hiring For Leadership

A bad hire can lead to several problems

Hiring is tricky at all levels, but hiring for leadership brings an extra level of complexity. When you’re at the individual contributor level, a candidate’s functional and technical skills are often the focus, and leadership potential may or may not be an immediate concern. But personal characteristics and leadership style become much more critical as seniority increases. 
 

Hiring for management and leadership roles requires a different approach. As hiring moves up the organizational chart through team leaders and department heads to the executive suite and, finally, to CEO, specific functional skills become less important, while soft skills and general underlying characteristics grow in importance. 

So too does the negative impact if you happen to make a bad hiring decision. At the individual contributor level, a bad hire can cause any number of problems. At the leadership level, these negatives are multiplied exponentially, decreasing engagement, making it harder to recruit and retain talent and undermining faith in company leadership across the board. 

Here are five mistakes to avoid to lessen the risk of making a bad leadership hire.

1. Insufficient clarity about the role and skills needed to succeed
Often, organizations try to fill a vacant or newly- created leadership role without taking the time to reach consensus on the necessary ingredients: agreement on the strategic goals and the job requirements; agreement on the desired outcomes, knowledge and skills needed to lead the team to those outcomes; and agreement on the necessary characteristics for a good fit with the team and the overall organization. 

Once that’s done, it’s important to prioritize which skills and capabilities, as well as what combination of knowledge and experience, would best suit the organization as a whole and the role specifically.

2. Moving too slowly or too quickly
Another common mistake organizations make is searching for perfection. They insist on finding a candidate with each and every competency, the exact experience listed in the job description, who fulfills every single qualification to the letter. Of course, the chance of finding that “perfect” candidate is slim to none; all that happens is the search drags on and candidates who could have been an excellent fit are weeded out. 

On the other hand, moving too quickly without thoroughly assessing a candidate’s fitness for most aspects of the role as well as their ability to quickly learn and grow means companies can hire quickly and then realize they’ve made a mistake. This happens often with sales roles; each day a position remains unfilled makes it harder for the company to meet sales and revenue goals. 

Smart companies know how to use assessment tools to explore a number of options and ensure they’re not missing out on diversity of thought, experience and background; taking a sufficiently deep dive into a candidate’s cognitive skills while still assessing critical thinking, management style, personality and motivations. 

3. Lack of structure and consistency in the interview process
Once potential candidates are identified, it’s important to conduct interviews consistently and make sure candidates are assessed on similar criteria. Interviewing is often subjective, and without co-ordination there may be redundancy of questions and important areas left unprobed. That can leave some of the softer leadership skills underexplored. 

HR and hiring managers can use insights from leadership assessment tests to know what topics, knowledge and experience to query and how to interview effectively based on a candidates’ cognitive ability, skills, leadership style and motivations. Pre-employment leadership assessments can be used to uncover specific topics and red-flag areas that will be explored in the interview. 

Those specific topics can be assigned to interviewers to make sure everything’s covered. Using a pre-employment assessment tool can also remove the problem of highly subjective reporting from different interviews so the organization has a structured objective, data-driven source of truth to help inform their hiring decisions.

4. Putting too much emphasis on past experience and performance
While it’s important to look at a candidate’s past when evaluating their potential future in your organization, it is rarely a perfect predictor. They could have exaggerated on their resume or been too modest in their interview. Perhaps they weren’t a good cultural fit at a previous role - that can impact performance. So, make sure you’re getting a solid contextual understanding of all factors that impacted their performance because that can be more valuable than a long list of accomplishments. It’s also important to thoroughly assess a candidate’s soft skills and leadership potential, as those capabilities are difficult to capture on a resume.

5. Over reliance on ‘gut feeling’ and ‘liking’ the candidate
We often want to hire others who are like us, who agree with us, and who reinforce the things we like about ourselves. This can lead to homogeneity of thought and experience which can stifle innovation, harm engagement and retention, and negatively impact the company. 

A hiring assessment tool can help you assess the suitability of a candidate, but can also serve as a gut-check. If the candidate “feels” right, and the assessment tool’s report also recommends them, you can be confident in your decision. If your gut feeling and the report do not agree, it is well worth exploring the disconnect. By combining the two approaches, organizations can ensure they’re making a sound, data-informed hiring decision. 

Hiring for leadership roles requires a slightly different approach and emphasizes hard-to-quantify soft skills. Using a pre-employment assessment tool especially one designed specifically to measure leadership qualities and characteristics can ensure you avoid these common mistakes.

Charlie Atkinson is CEO of PeopleFactors. Connect Charlie Atkinson