Why Do New Hires Fail?
A 2007 survey from Leadership IQ of 20,000 new hires showed that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months of joining a company. The amount of successful hires was only a mere 19%.
Why did the new hires fail? Was this because the employees didn’t have the technical competencies to perform the job?
No. Only 11% of those workers lost their job because they did not have the proper skills. This means that organizations are simply hiring the wrong people. These people are technically qualified, but they just aren’t a good fit for the position.
Since only 11% of mis-hires fail because a lack of technical competencies, we can see that there are other factors at play, which are responsible for the success of a new hire. If we want to hire for fit, we have to remember that hiring for fit is more than technical fit.
If we think about hiring for fit as a three legged stool, we can see that often times we only focus on two legs of the stool: skills and experience. We completely forget about the third leg of the stool: psychological fit. We don’t bother to think about how the employee will psychologically fit with the position and thus are confused when after we hire the candidate, the stool topples over.
But what does it mean to have a psychological fit with the job?
Many researchers have defined psychological fit through the term job fit. Job fit refers to the degree to which a person feels that their interest and values align with their current job (Resick et al., 2007).
Psychological factors such as job fit ultimately affect performance (Resick et al., 2007). If we go back to the Leadership IQ survey, we see that 26% of new hires fail because they can’t accept feedback, 23% because they’re unable to understand and manage emotions, 17% because they lack the necessary motivation to excel, and 15% because they have the wrong temperament for the job. These criteria are directly related to the degree of psychological fit between the employee and the job.
Understanding how to hire for psychological fit is often viewed as something that is interesting but not urgent. “When we have the time, we will get around to looking into it.” Yet with only a mere 19% of new hires succeeding time after time, being able to hire for psychological fit is something that no company can afford to overlook.
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Photo Credit: Flickr/Paul Keller