When hiring an employee, how do you ensure to not hire the wrong person? No one sets out to hire the wrong person, but certain hiring and recruiting practices, delegation of recruitment tasks, and post-hire training can quickly turn a well-intentioned recruitment effort into a costly mistake. In fact, a bad hire can cost your organization anywhere from one to five times the employee’s annual salary. That's no surprise when you consider the direct and indirect costs associated with such a hire:

• HR time hiring an employee, hiring supervisor’s time, and other recruiting/interviewing costs
• Salary and benefits covering the period of time the poor performing individual was employed
• Unemployment insurance, compensation, legal fees, severance pay
• Training/on-boarding costs
• Productivity losses
• Lost customers/market share/company knowledge
• Negative effect on co-workers’ morale and productivity
• Additional recruitment and training fees which must be repeated with a new hire

These costs add up and take a toll on your organization's productivity and bottom line. So it's crucial to learn exactly what to avoid when hiring an employee and what you can do to make sure you're finding employees who are the right fit for the job.

In a BLR webinar titled "Bad Hires: Why Recruiting Errors Are So Costly and How to Avoid Them," Charles S. Plumb and Angela Paulsen outlined some of the risks involved with bad hires, and also gave some advice on the best use of job descriptions in your recruiting and staffing process.

The Importance of Good Job Descriptions When Hiring an Employee

Do you know the value of good job descriptions when hiring an employee? Sometimes we don't think about job descriptions as a major component of the hiring process, but it can be one of the keys to getting the right individual into the role. During the webinar, Plumb and Paulsen gave some tips on constructing a job description and what to include. Job descriptions must be accurate and should identify the following:

• Qualifications (education, certifications/licenses, skills, experience)
• Physical requirements
• The role of the job
• Description of tasks and essential functions
• Social or environmental requirements, such as working in a team setting
• Hours required to work, especially shift work or weekend work

In addition, the job description should separate the critical or essential job duties from the "helpful" qualifications or requirements.

When crafting a good job description, it’s all about process. To make the best effort, here are some tips:

• Involve employees currently or previously performing the job (interviews, surveys)
• Involve supervisors
• Periodically review and update your job descriptions

Finally, once you have a good job description, be sure to use it to your advantage throughout the recruiting and staffing process. During the webinar, Plumb advised: "if you've got an accurate job description that's timely and that is of recent vintage, you can use that job description to describe – for purposes of your recruiting material – what you're looking for, and you can show that how you describe the qualifications, experience, etc., in your ads is defensible if someone challenges it because it's coming right out of your accurate job description."

You can use it when you're preparing advertisements or solicitations to be sure the candidates know the requirements. Use it in hiring to compare candidate qualifications against. Use it in the interview process to gain related information on candidate qualifications related to the job requirements. Last but not least, use it in the decision process and be sure you have a process that allows you to fairly compare candidates based on their ability to do the job.

The above information is excerpted in part from a BLR webinar titled "Bad Hires: Why Recruiting Errors Are So Costly and How to Avoid Them," with experts Charles S. Plumb and Angela Paulsen. For more information on recruiting and staffing practices to avoid bad hires, order the webinar recording. To register for a future webinar, visit http://catalog.blr.com/audio.

Attorney Charles S. Plumb is the leader of the Labor & Employment Group representing management in all phases of employment law and labor relations for McAfee & Taft.

Attorney Angela Paulsen is the Human Resource Manager for Newfield Exploration and is an expert public speaker with more than 17 years of experience in HR and employment law.