It’s very easy when recruiting to rush in to a decision about hiring somebody, especially so when you haven’t been inundated with a significant number of good candidates.

Be cautious though when making a decision and be sure that you’ve truly explored the options open to you.  It’s sometimes better to delay a hire (and sub-sequent knock on to work load) than it is to hire someone who’s not right for the team. Hiring someone who is the wrong fit can have a real detrimental impact to the whole team.

One way to mitigate rushing in to a decision is to have a number of different people interview the candidate and then be responsible for making a decision about hiring them.  If you have at least 4 people interview a candidate then you can get a balanced view of the candidate. Ideally the other interviewers will be from other functions across the delivery side of the business (agile, dev, product, service etc). If any one person says “no” then it’s up the others to try and convince them to change their mind (if the candidate is worth fighting for) or the other must simply accept the decision and move on. It can be hard to say “No” to really good candidates, buts it’s a process that helps keep the bar high. It is of course more expensive and time consuming but if you’re trying to hire the best talent then it’s a system I would absolutely recommend.

So why do we rush in?

Of course there are commercial deadlines to meet and hiring constraints to work within but in my experience most people rush in to making decisions on candidates because the candidate is the “best” of the rest. This sounds harsh but it happens very frequently, especially in the testing and scrum master hiring arena (no doubt others too). After a string of pretty bad interviews it can be tempting to say “yes” to someone who stands out. And this may be a good strategy as you may get the person you want, but is the person standing out because they are exactly what you’re after, or just because they are somewhat better than the others? In the future I’ll share ways to get the right candidates first time so you spend less time interviewing bad candidates, but for now take it easy when hiring. Take some time, don’t rush, don’t feel the pressure too much and always try to be objective in your decision making. Hiring someone that doesn’t fit can be a very costly and demoralizing event. Instead, consider a group consensus as a way to get a more balanced view of a candidate.