4 things that can go wrong if you don’t test candidates

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

Hiring is one of those undermined challenges in any corporate setting, yet one of the most important aspects of it: it’s like the roots of a tree. Hiring is a complicated undertaking and it can be long-winded and messy. If you’re not really careful, a lot of things can go wrong if you don’t test candidates.

Like the roots of trees, hiring is somewhat of a hidden concept yet a very vital undertaking to ensure the flow of necessary components to fuel the tree’s survival. No one really notices it, but it’s one that tries to keep the whole structure from falling over, only with a careful observation that we really understand its value, and we wonder of what other things that could go wrong if hiring was done in a very careless and uninspected fashion.

Here are things that I think could possibly go wrong if we don’t test candidates before hiring them:

You may even be better at their job

The point of hiring people is to have people better than you at a specific task or field. If you hired someone who didn’t actually have the skillset you required upfront, you’ll probably be better off as a teacher for the candidate if you already know more by default!

It’s also a huge waste of time to re-hire. Not just because you haven’t made any progress and may become very skeptical, but because now you got burned once and will be wary for the next ones to come to the table.

You may be hiring someone with false credentials or identity

Of course, we want to hire someone who is effective at their jobs. We want that workflow going smoothly from department to department without a hitch. So we hire people who we see to have very good educational backgrounds and/or work experiences because they should know what they’re doing. Time is money, after all.

But not when they actually employed with false credentials and even identity. It’s a big issue if the candidate neglected to put in his criminal record (if any) or some less dire things like lying about their degree or work records, but that is still a very big headache!

Cool super spies like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or charming and roguish con-men like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can are awesome in movies, but not in the real world!

Financial losses

This one’s a no-brainer, bad hires are a financial liability to any business. Hiring people who aren’t suitable for their tasks is a precursor to tanking losses left and right. Imagine paying people to perform badly. Of course, productivity will be affected, too… and that means less revenue and slower growth as well.

According to a CareerBuilder survey, the average cost of one bad hire is nearly $15,000. Losing that amount for a single hire is never good for the books. Imagine if you had to hire more than five! That’s potentially $75,000 down the drain if you aren’t careful!

Team morale and trust takes a hit

We all have to co-exist in a harmonious fashion when in the workplace and trust is a very important anchor to keep things afloat.

First off, if you repeatedly hire questionable or unqualified candidates into your company, your other team members will start questioning your ability to make decisions. Then, they’ll slowly lose trust in your leadership thus affecting morale. This, in turn, also affects productivity. Overall your team will lose the drive to work for your cause and will most likely just leave before the ship crashes.

There is a way out of that hell

You know you’re better than that. You know you don’t want those problems getting in the way of your goals. Testing your candidates first before anything else won’t hurt. In fact, it will bolster your ranks with skilled individuals and overall improve the quality of service that your business has in offer.