Why CIOs Make Hiring Mistakes and Hire Bad EmployeesCIO Insight

by Dennis McCafferty

Why CIOs Make Hiring Mistakes and Hire Bad Employees - We’re sure at one point your CIO has looked at one of his workers and thought, “How the heck did he ever end up in my IT department?” Every IT department has a couple of bad apples. In fact, 46% of rookie hires won't survive their first 18 months on the job, according to industry research. And 22% of turnover occurs within the first 45 days.

These failures come at a high price: The cost of a bad hire can range from 1.5 to 3.5 times the salary of the employee in question. Clearly, this is something you’d like to avoid, but too many CIOs fall into the same, classic traps that keep them from making good recruitment decisions, according to Janco Associates. These mistakes demonstrate that optimal hiring practices require managers to walk a fine line. You can’t do it all on your own in interviewing and evaluating, but over-delegating can hurt too. You want to come up with a measurable system, but many necessary qualities are purely subjective calls. To help lend guidance, here’s Janco’s list of 10 common mistakes made--and how to avoid them.

The top reasons for these mistakes are:

  • CIO and IT Managers depend too much on HR
  • Person recruiting is in desperate need of staffing and hires for the moment
  • Hiring the best "looking" individual because you feel good looking at them
  • Good talker does not let you get into the details because they direct the conversation
  • Do not ask enough about the candidate will do in the job that is being filled
  • Too rigid of an interview process and not enough room to get to an in depth understanding of the candidate
  • Use a score mechanism to rank the candidate instead of detail notes which highlight who the candidate is
  • Too few people are involved in the interview process
  • Use metrics to measure each candidate instead of understanding how they will fit in the long term needs of the organization
  • Not looking back at why some hiring decisions are good while other are bad. Need to learn from both success and failures

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