It happens often, a company hires someone they think is going to be a great fit – educated, experienced, and motivated. They seem like the perfect candidate for the job and then six months later you’re wondering how you could have made such a bad decision in hiring them.

The selection process is a tricky one, and a costly one when the wrong decision can cost up to five times the annual salary of the position you’re trying to fill. So, how do you hire right the first time?

Training helps, but it is only part of the solution. First, you must honestly look at WHY an employee fails to live up to the job requirements.

• Did they not have the skills necessary?
• Were the proper resources not available for them to do their job?
• Do the job tasks not fulfill their interests and motivation?

There are two considerations when filling a spot on your team:

• What are the characteristics of the job itself?
• How do those characteristics correspond to the right candidate?

My first recommendation to companies in the hiring process is to start with job benchmarking. Job benchmarking allows you to identify the purpose of the position, and the big-picture results you want to achieve, instead of simply looking at the tasks completed as part of the job.

Once the benchmarks are identified, potential candidates complete my online assessments and we look for a match. Using key factors such as behaviors and motivators, and Emotional Intelligence assessment outcomes, we can identify whether the position’s purpose and the candidate’s motivators are a good fit. If they are, we can look deeper into the skills possessed by the candidate, and the details of the job. But, if the benchmarking indicates the candidate is not a good fit, no amount of training is going to magically change that – not when you’re looking at core values and beliefs.

Aside from saving time and money on candidate matching, one of the benefits of using job benchmarking and candidate assessments is that even when you find a great candidate who doesn’t fit the current position, you have the information necessary to identify other roles in your organization for which he/she may be perfect.

Motivation is a critical factor in the success of a person or a team. If you have employees who aren’t meeting the needs of their position, maybe it’s time to look at whether the job is serving their interests before you make any costly decisions.