Why do hiring processes fail?

A bad hire is painful, both financially and emotionally. You pay for the hire from the signing bonus to the severance. The rest of the team loses hours, days and weeks trying to bring the person up to speed. The business loses the opportunities that the person was not ready to take. And when a manager is the wrong hire, they go on to hire people in their own likeness.

We found three key drivers of why people get the decision wrong.

1. You don't really know what you're hiring for

In an iCIMS study, 80% of recruiters thought they had a high or very high understanding of the role they were hiring for, while about 60% of hiring managers thought recruiters had a low to moderate understanding of it. This is not a criticism of recruiters or hiring managers. They speak two different languages, because most companies don't invest the time they need to define what they're looking for. A Cipher fixes this.

2. The interviews are unstructured

If an interview starts with "So, tell me about yourself", get ready for a fun conversation, but it's not really an interview. Garbage in, garbage out. Without a clear structure and the same approach in every interview, you can't compare candidates consistently, and you end up shooting in the dark. See What is structured interviewing?

3. The process is siloed and does not scale

The hiring manager tries to do it all: define the role, do every interview and own the decision alone. That may sound admirable, but it is not effective. To design the role, you need people around you to show you what the role must add to your own skills. To interview, you need people who see what you might miss. See Can't I just do this by myself?