Here are three mistakes scale-ups make when hiring new staff, and how to avoid them.

1. You’re hiring too quickly

It’s understandable to want to hire fast when you need to innovate and keep up with demand with more manpower. However, it’s important to take your time to ensure new hires have the skills to succeed and are a good cultural fit for your organisation.

Often when trying to hire quickly, businesses make the mistake of not having the appropriate checks in place to ensure their new hires are the right fit, which comes with the risks associated with bad hires. Onboarding and training new hires properly is equally as important. A small team that works well together productively is better than a team that felt rushed or unwelcome when being hired and onboarded.

2. You haven’t defined your values or are not living them

Sometimes scale-ups are so focused on a fast expansion that they lose sight of the values that so heavily contributed to their business in the first place. At times, you may have an idea of your values, but haven’t put them into writing and embedded them into your policies and procedures.

When hiring new staff who are not aligned with your business’s values, you risk negatively affecting your workplace culture with unplanned change.

To prevent this, you need to be clear on the culture you want to continue to build and protect and have your values embedded in all levels of your hiring process – from advertising roles to your HR policies, onboarding and retention. Doing this will help ensure your new hires are aligned with your values and are a good fit for your scale-up and won’t hinder your growth.

3. You’re shortening your hiring process by disregarding background checks

You may be tempted to bring new hires onboard more quickly by shortening your hiring process, especially with many people speaking about a candidate market or talent shortage.

However, skipping screening steps in the hiring process can lead to placing employees that are not a great fit. Take the time to thoroughly evaluate your candidates and determine which one is the best fit for the role with not only interviews, but with the appropriate background checks. It will save you time in the long run.

As a scale-up, this is even more important, as a negative impact on your culture and reputation, while you’re still growing, is likely to have long-lasting effects. This is a lesson that New Zealand scale-up Timely learnt when their employee was “cancelled” online.

How to avoid hiring mistakes as a scale-up with social media screening

When it comes to new hires for your scale-up, ensuring your candidates are aligned with your business is imperative to your success, reputation and growing culture.

While interviews, reference checks and police checks are valuable tools to give you different data points for assessing your candidates unfortunately they don’t consider the online behaviour of candidates, which can provide key indicators around cultural fit and risks regarding potential brand and reputation damage.

Hiring and then potentially being associated with something your employee has negatively done or posted on the web (or could do while employed) can be costly and detrimental to your business’ reputation and overall success. Social media screening can inform you of a person’s ideas, opinions, influences and associations from the content they publicly share on the Internet and add an extra screening layer to your recruitment process so you’re able to protect your culture, brand and reputation.

Your scale-up, can use social media streening to quickly and expertly check for any red flags in your candidates’ online activity and will pick up:

• Discriminatory behaviours: such as sexism, racism, homophobia and hate speech
• Unprofessional behaviours: such as strong language, bad-mouthing employers or coworkers and online bullying
• Criminal behaviours: such as violence, fraud and cybercrime

With digital footprint checks in place, you can avoid common hiring mistakes and be confident in hiring a workforce you can trust.

Download a free sample report

To get an example of what a digital footprint check looks like, the information they include and the types of content they flag, you can download a free sample report.

The 23-page sample includes:

• A Candidate Risk Score and Cultural Fit Assessment
• An outline of our cultural fit indicators
• Examples of content that indicate discriminatory, unprofessional and criminal behaviours
• Examples of other candidate insights