3 Reasons Why employees fail to live up to expectations

Discover How to Eliminate Bad Hires Through Job Benchmarking

I hear this all the time:

Why is the person I hired different from the person I interviewed six months ago?

In the selection process, many times organizations hire seemingly qualified and capable job candidates, only to later find out they’ve made a bad hire.

Successful managers know recruiting the right people to work for you will make or break your organization, while poor hiring decisions can cost three and five times the person's annual salary.

We should all be striving to hire right the first time and not try to resolve issues related to job fit on training and development.

Training is sometimes the easy answer, but it isn’t always the right answer, nor does it provide a clear resolution to overall job fit. As a solution to employee workplace performance, training doesn’t work because it will only resolve a training problem.

And management wonders why it often struggles with resolving these issues.

There are three reasons why employees fail to live up to prescribed job requirements:

• They lack the necessary hard skills and soft skills to perform well

• They don’t have the proper resources required to do their job

• They aren’t motivated and the duties are not in their self-interests

Remember my basis about how training won’t solve your organization’s problems related to job fit? Only the first reason I listed above can be solved through training.

Through TTI’s innovative job-benchmarking process, organizations can better understand and define what the job is truly all about. The benchmarking approach identifies a specific job — not the person — to improve organizational dynamics.

Instead of dedicating hours to train an employee who may not be a good fit from the outset, organizations should have a ready response to these questions in determining job fit.

• What are the key accountabilities for this position?

• What are the skills employees must possess to have superior on-the-job performance?

• What goals should employees commit to achieving in this position over the next year?

• How should employees be held accountable?

• If employees had a clearer understanding of their job, could they be more productive?

Training is important in understanding the requisite knowledge and skills needed to be successful in many of today’s jobs.

But using training to solve performance-related issues is a waste of time and effort. Most organizations don’t need to procure training programs to determine if employees are good assets.

Before management decides to apply training solutions to determine proper job fit, they should first determine if that’s the problem in need of fixing in the first place.