How to reduce the risks of bad hires for aerospace and defense?

For contractors with delicate situations, sensitive information, and tight timetables, an inadequate hire can spell many costs for your company. They contribute to many difficulties regarding productivity, skill gaps, and management. Bad hires can also create toxic work environments, propagating a negative culture that directly affects morale and hampers productivity.

Most of these issues can be mitigated by hiring right the first time. It requires that each party involved, from the hiring manager, the recruiter, and the candidate, understand the role’s objectives and the intricacies and requirements behind each from the get-go. It also includes understanding the needs of each party at a more fundamental level, such as understanding benefits, preferences, and other considerations.

Already faced with many challenges, such as talent shortages and the arrival of a new generation, companies are hard-pressed even still to be able to manage the stringent recruitment process that companies are hired for, especially aerospace and defense contractors.

In this post, we unravel the technical recruitment process and how to minimize the risk of bad, inadequate, or unsuitable hires. By the end of this article, you should be able to draft a well-developed strategy to fill your organization’s most essential roles.

Before even thinking about bad hires, let’s briefly talk about the basic costs of recruitment. According to new benchmarking data from the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire was almost $4,700.

However, depending on the roles, many companies estimate that the total cost of hiring a new employee can be three to four times more expensive than the position’s salary. This includes soft costs like the time department leaders and managers must spend supporting HR-related hiring activities.

Candidates who were hired and turned out to be bad hires compound an already costly endeavor and practically ensure additional expenses – whether in investing in additional training or, even worse, sourcing a replacement.

Beyond those, it’s easy to see how hiring the wrong candidate in this process negatively affects your operations and projects.

Here are some other indirect costs caused by bad hires:

Productivity: Losing important people directly impacts productivity and overall expenses. For one, it disrupts an already established network that manages interrelated functions within the organization. This is especially true for aerospace and defense companies, where teamwork and technical ability often work hand-in-hand.

Increase in turnover and attrition: Bad hires may cause unsuitable working conditions and issues regarding morale, culture, and turnover rates for the company and the new hire. They may create toxic work environments or even abruptly leave.

Decrease in quality: An unqualified hire hampers and gets in the way of delivering high-quality products and services.

Heightened safety concerns: Some hires may be unable or unwilling to follow protocol, unfit to handle sensitive information, or even be unqualified to work in certain circumstances or environments.

Lost candidates: There is a cost for lost candidates. This may be caused by competition, a failure in certain qualifications that were overlooked, or failures in coming up with a satisfying negotiation in work contracts. This has huge ramifications for smaller companies or teams with high-level technical positions that require specific knowledge and expertise.

There can be many combinations of causes that result in bad hires.

Lack of coordination between relevant parties: Every team involved in the hiring process must be well-coordinated, from the HR manager to the candidate. Lack of coordination may result in increased placement times, botched costings, and misidentification of talent & other related information.

Rushed processes: Since companies typically hire in times of need, they may feel pressured to ramp or speed up the hiring process. This can overextend recruitment staff, having to work on multiple tasks to hire quickly, resulting in oversights in the process.

The inverse may also be true, wherein a slow pace negatively affects the quality of the recruitment process.

Lack of standardization: Many companies still lack standardized practices for recruitment. In the aerospace and defense industry, which may need to fill specialized roles, standard practices also help streamline the process of sourcing and hiring hard-to-find candidates.

Many problems or issues that can typically be easily resolved with a standardized process can complicate or bottleneck the process. Having no standardization also directly leads to mismatched hires.

Lack of a talent base/network: Companies may not have the network or resources needed to fill roles precisely, quite so for the more elusive skills. This may make hiring managers rely on otherwise unsatisfactory candidates.

Miscommunication: Miscommunicating details, such as technical requirements, interview processes, job descriptions, or overall expectations, may result in bad hires. In fact, the recruitment process may slow down or grind to a halt due to miscommunication of many forms.

Whether an interviewer mistakenly asks the wrong questions or a recruitment specialist mishandles job postings or sourcing, miscommunication can wreak havoc on your recruitment efforts and often lead to bad hires.

While it may seem easy to mistakenly onboard a bad hire, there are ways to prevent it. In summary, crafting and planning an efficient, standardized hiring process that is flexible enough to adapt to varying role requirements and staffing needs is key. Including judicious uses of other tools and adapting strong hiring practices would guarantee a great hire every time.

But while a company’s recruitment process is vital to successful hiring, what really lies underneath that process is an organization’s ability to find, assess, and evaluate a candidate in a way that aligns with their company’s goals, vision, and culture.

Many companies fall into the trap of simply outlining a job description as a single source of truth when it comes to finding and attracting talent. Remember that a job description is simply copy-written to attract talent while giving them an overview.

The teams involved in hiring should be clear about the intricacies and nuances of the roles between themselves first.

Take the time to process and identify the roles and responsibilities for the job and to align any team involved so that you’re all on the same page. Consider how this role may evolve in the future and how your ideal candidate can help push that growth.

Do you even need to hire in the first place, or could there be something else that can change to better optimize not just the hiring process but operations?

Who is your ideal candidate anyway? What are the characteristics and skills you’re looking for? What adjacent skills or competencies could they possess that could be a welcome advantage? Are we willing to increase our budget on certain candidates?

Should the candidate be a big-picture thinker or detail-oriented?

This may involve setting time to meet between teams or team members and discussing the needed role (which we’ll talk more about later).

Having a clear understanding of the role and its function within the organization is crucial and ties into our next tip as well.

Having a definite idea of the role and its other intricacies is important, but throughout the process, it is important that the recruitment team (and all other teams involved) can set proper expectations around the hiring process. You should be setting proper expectations within the organization and with prospects you may be looking to hire.

This, of course, includes having a well-written, descriptive job posting. You may also craft supporting documentation to help guide you along the way. Ensure that the candidates and team involved in hiring are aware and cognizant of the onboarding process and how far along they are.

Gather (and provide) feedback from the candidate, teammates, and other sources of wisdom that can give a better picture of each candidate and how they can grow into the role. Never assume any details, and when in doubt, immediately clarify.

Maintaining the practice of setting proper expectations also fosters better communication between the organization and the candidate, increasing the chance of making the correct hire every time.

A standardized hiring process allows you to benefit from a more objective approach and lets you systematically adapt and learn from previous experiences.

While talent acquisition is a complex process, simply standardizing your process allows you to simplify and merge many aspects of it to be more effective.

To understand how to lay out the onboarding process for your company, it is essential to hark back to your company’s values and mission – and the type of characters and personages that are needed for the type of work your company does.

If there are a lot of technical skills involved in your jobs, then create an assessment that allows you to determine a candidate’s capability in relation to your requirements.

Some other practices include:

• A standardized interview process that can be retrofitted for myriads of roles
• Onboarding workbooks for candidates
• Creating supporting documents for the onboarding process, roles and responsibilities, etc.
• Pre-hire screenings and assessments

It is important to remember that your goal is not to make the onboarding process more difficult but rather to standardize it to make it as easy and efficient for all parties as possible. You may even consider removing or at least altering some processes to unencumber all of your efforts.

Ensure that all parties involved also understand the standard process and what is required of them in each phase.

Using your understanding of the hiring process and your organization’s traits, hiring managers should form a strategic interview process.

An in-depth interview process ensures that you can understand a candidate more succinctly. You can gather the most critical and relevant information, and the teams involved know what to expect and how to conduct their parts of the interview.

Your hiring process should also consider the types of questions and information they need to ask to understand how a candidate fits into the organization.

Asking the right questions includes being aware and prepared to test a candidate’s technical mastery, personality, and alignment with your company’s values. This also means building rapport and a genuine connection with candidates, showing genuine interest in both ways.

A good interview will allow you to verify a candidate’s qualifications while at the same time informing and engaging the candidate in the role and culture that your company features. They will be curious and ask about the office environment and its team members and share with you their outlook on how your company functions and its values.

Candidates tend to exaggerate their experiences and achievements, whether they know it or not. Be mindful and verify all information and find out if there are gaps and why there could be. Sometimes, false information might be provided through honest mistakes or miscommunication, so make sure to be diligent in checking any documentation or information from both the candidate’s and your organization’s end.

You must also not overstate the importance of experience over other integral factors that indicate a candidate’s value. Some employees may have been mediocre on a job for decades, while others may have been placed in roles that are well below their abilities. Knowing the information to ask is great, but having a purpose and clear intention in your questions will help you build the picture of your ideal candidate, communicate and plan for it, and mitigate the risks of getting a bad hire.

Using technology to help standardize and optimize your processes is essential. You can use emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and pre-hire & post-hire data to make better decisions and continuously improve your onboarding process.

While complex, there are ways to make our work easier while ensuring we always hire a great candidate. No – you won’t ever hire that perfect candidate – but all your efforts will be rewarded in the long run with engaged employees, increased productivity and retention, and a better harmonious working environment.

Cad Crowd.AI uses a top-notch recruiting process to help mission-critical companies find key talent. Discover how to tap our established network of 100k+ expert engineers and leverage artificial intelligence to hire the right one – partner with us today.