Press Release
Best Hiring Practices: Full Disclosure
Find the best candidates by making honesty your best policy.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
By Mark A. Tootsey, CPA, Director Branch Operations for Stephen James Associates, Rockville, MD
It’s a familiar experience among employers; you hire a new employee and after only a few weeks or months, he quits. His reason for leaving? “This job just isn’t what I thought it would be.”
When this happens it’s easy to aim frustration at the departing employee, but what you should be doing is re-examining your hiring process—especially if this kind of turnover is a recurring problem. Applicants begin developing expectations about a position and a company as soon as they read the job description. If a job ends up being a lot different than an employee anticipated, it’s often because he received incorrect or incomplete information during the application process.
False expectations can be costly.
Providing inadequate or incorrect information can be a costly mistake. When you hire someone who doesn’t understand the full scope of his job, he’s more likely to quit. Turnover disrupts work in progress and can hurt morale among existing staff. And when a position opens, it takes valuable financial and human resources to hire and train replacements.
When companies provide misleading or incomplete information to applicants, it’s sometimes unintentional and can be contributed to the carelessness or ignorance of those responsible for compiling job descriptions or conducting interviews. However, it’s often done intentionally to make a job sound more appealing or to omit details that may be a turnoff to applicants.
I once had a client who was hiring for a position that, while otherwise desirable, required that the employee work in a warehouse, away from the company’s main offices and other colleagues. Knowing that this workspace would be undesirable to most applicants, the client refused to disclose it to interviewees. To him, it was an innocuous omission. But it resulted in his new employee becoming disgruntled and quitting after only a few weeks on the job.
This happened two more times before the employer finally realized that he’d have better luck keeping this position filled if he came clean to candidates before they accepted the job. Sure enough, it didn’t take him long to find someone who was just fine with the off-site office. And because the new guy knew what he was getting into, he had no reason to feel deceived and leave.
Being in the recruiting business, I hear a lot of employment stories, and many of the negative ones begin the same—with false expectations. One woman arrived on her first day of a new job to find that her boss and her responsibilities had been changed since she’d accepted the offer. The new situation didn’t align with her career goals, so she resigned after several months. Another woman started at a company and discovered that the job description didn’t accurately detail the excessive demands and responsibilities of the position. She found herself working into the nights and weekends and becoming so stressed that she left in less than a year.
As an employer, you expect a job applicant to present himself honestly. Employees deserve the same respect. Being deceptive about an open position or about your company is just as bad as an applicant lying on a resume.
Retain talent by setting realistic expectations.
To set realistic expectations for new staff, and to avoid unnecessary turnover, the most important thing hiring managers and recruiters can do is implement a “full disclosure” strategy for the interview process. When a candidate accepts an offer, he should already have a complete understanding of job responsibilities, requirements for advancement, the working environment and company culture.
Here are several tips that will help ensure your job candidates know what to expect:
- Create thorough job postings. Include essential facts, such as primary day-to-day duties; management and administrative responsibilities; the amount of travel and extracurricular involvement required; and any physical demands. To avoid getting resumes from unqualified candidates, be upfront with what type of education, credentials, work experience, knowledge and skills you expect from your ideal candidate.
- Update job descriptions frequently, and get help from the incumbent. Take the time to review and revise job descriptions each time a position opens. And who better to describe a position than the person currently in it? If possible, have the exiting employee provide a detailed account of his responsibilities.
- Think of the interview as an information-sharing session. This isn’t just a time to ask tough questions. It’s an opportunity to provide detailed, accurate information. Talk about the positives and the negatives of the job, invite interviewees to ask specific questions, and answer honestly.
- Discuss your company culture in the interview. Are social gatherings a key part of your culture, or is it all business, all the time? Is your work environment formal or laid back? Is success at your company dependent on working long hours? Discussing culture will help set expectations and ensure your new hires know what they’re getting into, and that they’re a good fit for the organization’s culture.
- Find a tactful way to disclose negative aspects of a job. Not every facet of a job is going to be rosy, but it doesn’t benefit anyone to keep it a secret. If you have narrowed the applicant pool to a few contenders, it’s a good time to carefully communicate the realities of the job. This can be done delicately, without positioning the situation as a negative. For example, if a position requires one to work with a particularly difficult client, present this as a challenge. If long hours are required, promise the candidate that hard work doesn’t go unrewarded and then reward for the hard work. And if the position comes with an undesirable workspace, provide reassurance that it is only temporary.
- If you’re a recruiter, encourage your clients to practice full disclosure. As a recruiter, when a job placement falls through it can impact your commission-based income, not to mention cause a strain on your client relationships. It’s imperative to your success that you adopt this same full-disclosure strategy for the recruiting process. Communicate with your clients the importance of honesty in job descriptions and interviews, and if they balk, you might want to reconsider whether working with them is good for your business.
It can be tempting to advertise a job by making it sound better than it is. But your objective shouldn’t just be to sell the job; it should be to find the best candidate for the job—one who has accurate expectations, and therefore is likely to stick with it.
Sure, it may take longer to fill the position, but you can be assured that the person you hire will be a good match, and you won’t waste money and other resources by hiring and rehiring for the same position. And by adopting honesty as your best policy, you’ll establish trust from the very start.