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Deciding who needs to be involved in finding and hiring a new employee can be challenging. A common problem with involving multiple people in the hiring process is the difficulty of getting everyone to agree about a candidate. If you expect to make the hiring decision in cooperation with other members of your team, there is a good chance you will end up picking the candidate who everyone finds “most” acceptable. This may seem like the obvious thing to do, but it doesn’t mean that it is the right choice.
You might have a clear standout who everyone thinks is the perfect fit, but you may just as easily have several good candidates. This is especially true for lower-level positions that require less skill or experience. There may be several applicants who have a good chance of performing the job well.
Tools such as pre-hire assessment tests can help break an impasse in the hiring process and allow you gain more insight into apparently similar candidates. Conducting strong interviews will also bring more information to light. However, there may still be factors that cause your talent team to disagree about the choice. Those involved in hiring may feel very differently about each applicant for any number of reasons.
In this scenario, a team may opt to select the person who is accepted by all; in other words, the person who is least objectionable.
If, at the start of your hiring process, someone told you to look for the “least objectionable” candidate, you would rightly find that to be very poor criteria. You want the best: the people who will be able to perform the work well and who will care about making your company succeed. Yet intelligent employers and hiring managers sometimes really do end up choosing the “least objectionable” candidate. They do it because that is who their team can agree on.
Obviously, you want the candidate to be accepted by your team, but you can’t allow this to trump the more evidence-based factors. We can be so used to trying to come up with a solution that works for everyone that we value agreement over making the right decision. In cases where you have no choice but to allow multiple people in the final decision-making, you will need to use caution. Understand your argument for choosing one candidate over another well and communicate it to others effectively.
One way to make this hiring process easier is to have a clear means of stating your opinions. Some people may not be able to articulate why they prefer one candidate over another. (This may be a warning sign that the decision has some emotional basis.) Consider distributing evaluation forms to better highlight areas of difference among the hiring team and track opinions.
There are many ways to evaluate a candidate. Don’t let your standards fall by the wayside in order make a faster or easier decision.
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