subject: Why New Hires Fail [print this page] Close to about fifty percent of new employees tend to fail within the first eighteen months of their jobs, according to a research carried by Leadership IQ. (failure in this case is in context of being terminated or quitting under pressure or coercion , by cause of discipline and in the case of declining performance.)
The problem isnt lack of skill for the job in question. Consequently, the research depicted that about 26% of new employees fail due to their inability to accept feedback or creative criticism, about 23% are emotionally crippled and lack management of these emotions, 17% of these new hires find it difficult to generate the motivation to do well, 15% do not have the appropriate personality to perform adequately and as low as 11% because the most important of the technical skills are missing.
To be more precise over 80% of the managers stated that individuals were flagged but disregarded initially. The results were as expected, if a candidate reaches the interview stage of selection, his/her screening process should have been thorough that basic technical skills are present. Keeping that as a benchmark further qualities need to be assessed like temperament, ethical values, emotional intelligence, the eye for work, broad minded, and other qualities that occur naturally rather than being taught. But many managers fall prey to the halo effect and judge over specific skills set or the knowledge base while ignoring other more important skills which will eventually differentiate high achievers from the outliers.
Unfortunately interviewers over emphasize technical skills since its the easiest to asses in context of the skills says the researchers. But again being technically proficient doesnt always mean the hire will perform at optimum level.
So who are the managers that ire correctly. Research shows that a very small niche of managers has successfully hired are those that give a great deal of relevance to qualities that deal with motivational and interpersonal communications. Also candidates those are psychologically confident, usually very confident in determining the right people for the job.
This in lay mans terms its usually the gut feeling which gets blamed if the deal goes south. But its when your gut has been trained and pickled with experience it usually turns out to be quite fruitful, and usually it doesnt stumble on discrimination of any form so it may not be such a bad idea to follow it.
This study that extended for over 3 years focused on about 5,300 managers from approximately 100 private and public businesses and many health care companies that took aboard over 20,000 employees over the stated period. The final conclusion was inconclusive as it found little or no substantial deviation in the failure rates over the various interviewing techniques.
