Unhappy Days: Employees, Employers Often Regret Their Decision

Buyers’ Remorse: Nothing is as tricky for hiring directors as making the right employee selection from a field of applicants. Research released October 24 by the Washington-based Recruiting Roundtable underscores this point. It finds that either organizations or their newly hired employees wind up regretting their choice. The result: Employees are less committed to their new organizations, costing organizations millions of dollars in lower performance and higher turnover. The study aims to quantify the negative impact of poor hiring decisions. One key factor is that about 40 percent of new employees say the information they received when applying for the job turned out to be “less than accurate.”

The Roundtable study analyzed data from more than 8,500 hiring managers and 19,000 of their most recently hired employees. Three important reasons emerged to explain why companies consistently fail to hire high-quality candidates: “[Companies] over-rely on candidates describing themselves,” rather than forcing them to demonstrate their abilities; organizations don’t “follow a consistent, evidence-based selection decision process”; and employers “fail to provide the candidate with enough information” regarding the true nature of the job.