How to Minimize Candidate Selection Anxiety
Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of hiring managers inflicted with candidate selection anxiety.
The fact is, hiring mistakes are unavoidable. Humans are not widgets. There are no perfect candidates or employees.
If you are a hiring manager, we can guarantee you that you will make a bad hiring decision from time to time. There is no quality control process that you or your organization can implement to prevent these bad hiring decisions completely.
It’s just life in the people business.
Some candidates who interview exceptionally and appear to be fantastic employee material turn out to be completely the opposite. On the other hand, candidates who interview poorly or do not have relevant experience can turn out to be some of the best employees and go on to achieve great things in their careers.
Hiring talent is a risk. There is no foolproof hiring system.
To get over selection anxiety, you must learn to trust your hiring process and your instincts.
Sometimes you just have to go with your “gut.”
However, if your hiring process is broken, you will make mistakes more often.
Why? Because you don’t have checks and balances in place to show you that you are making a mistake and how to correct it. If you put a solid hiring process in place and learn from past mistakes, you will have more success stories to share than failures. But you can save yourself a lot of stress if you accept the fact that you will not be 100 percent successful with your hires.
Procrastination and avoidance are not a productive way to handle selection anxiety. They only prolong the pain and ultimately hurt your company, and often your career.
Indecisiveness causes bigger problems in the long run. When you put off important hiring decisions, the work you are hiring to support remains incomplete and stress mounts. The only way to help overcome the challenge is to hire the experienced talent needed to get the job done efficiently and effectively.
Additionally, if you delay the decision to hire for too long, candidates may begin to form a negative impression of your company as a “phantom employer”—that is, a company that gets candidates all excited about an opportunity but never makes a valid employment offer.
Would your company benefit from this type of reputation? Absolutely not. Over time, negative impressions from candidates get spread around and start to erode your company’s brand.
How to Minimize Candidate Selection Anxiety:
Create a hiring scorecard. This allows you to organize your thoughts and your process while measuring key metrics.
Invite team members to be part of the interview process. Often, more perspectives on a person will help you see things you may have missed.
Trust your knowledge and instincts. If you’ve been doing this awhile, you’ve developed good instincts. They’re like muscles. The more you use them, the bigger and better they get - but you have to trust them!
Stop second-guessing yourself. You were given the authority to make hiring decisions because you have earned that authority.
Accept that you will hire the wrong candidate in your career more than once. It’s okay - it really does happen to even the world’s BEST recruiters.
Learn from your mistakes. If you keep making the same mistake over and over again, that’s costing your company time and money. Don’t beat yourself up about mistakes but make sure and learn from them! This keeps them from being a waste and instead, makes them an opportunity.
If your hiring process is broken and you’re finding that candidate selection anxiety is part of the problem, perhaps it’s time to bring in an expert and automate some of your systems.
CLICK HERE to schedule a call with us to determine if our expert consulting services are right for you or if you’d be a good candidate for the hottest new hiring technology around - Fytster. JLW Consulting LLC. is proud to partner with this revolutionary company that helps mitigate bias, streamlines your hiring process, and helps you find the RIGHT fit more often with the use of the most modern people-matching technology available coupled with psychology.