Author: Pamela Swift

Being an entrepreneur can certainly be a challenge. If you have dreams of owning your own business, you should consider the fact that it will require a mountain of effort. There are hundreds and even thousands of tasks that must be performed to insure everything goes smoothly.

One of these tasks you may have not given much thought is hiring employees. Who you hire to help you run your company is extremely important. If you choose the wrong people, you could hasten your young business’s downfall. Alternatively, if you do not perform the hiring process competently, you could run afoul of the law. With that in mind, below five mistakes in the hiring process you should try to avoid.

Skipping the Background Check

A background check is essential to the hiring process these days. If you think you can simply save some money by avoiding this step, you could certainly face problems later on.

Nearly 50 percent of federal prison inmates go on to reoffend. If you hire an ex-con, there’s about a 50 percent chance they will commit another crime. This time, however, your company or your customers could be the victims. You won’t know about a person’s criminal record unless you actually make the effort to find out what it is.

Not Examining a Person’s Social Media

While not all job applicants use social media, many do. Using social media as part of the hiring process is also now becoming increasingly popular. 96 percent of recruiters look at a candidate’s’ social media, and rightly so.

The reason why is easy to understand. You may find clues about behaviors that would not be a good fit for your company and could cause problems later down the road. For example, if a candidate is reposting content that sympathizes with terrorists on Twitter, chances are you don’t want that person working for you.

Hiring People You Know

New small business owners often make the mistake of simply hiring people they know. This could be friends, family members, college roommates or what have you. However, unless your goal is to have a family business, you should probably think more strategically about the hiring process. You want to hire the best applicants for the job. You may be biased towards people you already know. Furthermore, employing friends or family could actually do irreparable harm to those relationships. You need to keep this in mind.

Not Open to Outsourcing the Process 

Hiring new employees is a very complex and time consuming process. Even worse, it’s a legal mind field. If you make mistakes and disregard the law, you may end up being sued. This is one of the reasons why many companies outsource the hiring process to a recruitment process outsourcing firm, or RPO for short.

This will move the legal burden to that third party. Furthermore, it will save you a lot of effort by having experts perform the recruitment process for you. You’ll be able to focus on more important tasks like your end product. It has been reported that two thirds of companies partly or wholly outsource the recruitment process.

Ignoring Intuition

The interview is one of the most important parts of the recruitment process. The reason that is true is because it gives you information you can’t discern just by looking at a resume. How a person acts and converses in person is a big part of whether or not that person is employable or a good fit with your company. In this regard, intuition is important. Someone who makes a good impression may be a better choice than a person who comes off as antisocial but has more accomplishments on their resume.

The hiring process is extremely important. It can be tricky for a new business, but you must take recruitment efforts seriously, and there can be serious negative consequences if you don’t.

Article Contributed by Sara Taylor, President, deepSEE Consulting and Author of Filter Shift: How Effective People SEE the World.

Diversity Fatigue. It’s that feeling that employees in the workplace express when they see a Diversity training on their calendar, “Seriously?! Diversity training again?” It’s that feeling that seasoned Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practitioners express when I run into them at a Diversity conference and they say, “We’re still talking about the same issues we talked about 20 years ago!” It’s that feeling that leaders in organizations get after supporting a D&I strategy but still don’t see the results they’d like to see.

This fatigue is a symptom of a larger issue.  Despite decades of hard work by committed practitioners and leaders, the promise of D&I has remained ever outside our reach. As a practice of Diversity and Inclusion, our approach needs to evolve in order to fully meet that promise. It’s time for Transformational Diversity.

Transformational Diversity is a shift to a new level that requires us to actually operate differently. We enter the workplace—whether it is already diverse and inclusive or not—with new mindsets and skillsets that allow us to transform the situations we’re in and the organizations we lead because we’re actually able to see and respond to greater levels of complexity. This sets a goal that is much more challenging and thus more requires more comprehensive work. When we operate in this stage, we ensure that differences transform individuals and their ideas as well as organizations, their environments and the work they generate.

To achieve Transformational Diversity, we need to be able to Filter Shift^®, to recognize both our own unconscious Filters as well as the Filters of others, then shift those Filters to respond more effectively in each situation and with every decision.

Filter Shift combines both the ability to reduce the negative interference of the unconscious and increase the ability of Cultural Competence. With a combination of these abilities, we are able to see and respond to the complexities of Diversity, to transform our perspectives and therefore the situations we are in and to finally achieve the promise of Diversity.

Both of these abilities are necessary for us to reach that transformation. Let’s look first at Cultural Competence. Many of us are operating on the left side.[1] In a continuum of cultural competence development there is a distinct difference between the first three stages on the left side where we are significantly less effective and the last two stages on the right side where we reach higher levels of effectiveness as we interact with others. 15% of us have made it to the right side, but only 2.5% of us are in the last and highest stage of competence where we have the level of competency necessary to operate in today’s diverse workplace. [2]

When we operate on the right side, we begin to see a greater level of complexity when it comes to differences. The key is that we see those differences without judging them—consciously or unconsciously. They aren’t good. They aren’t bad. They’re just different.

This is where the ability to reduce the negative interference of the unconscious comes in. Our Filters, that operate in our unconscious, determine how we see each other, the decisions we make and the behaviors we deem good, right and professional. Since they are formed by my past experiences, I believe them to be true even when they’re not.

Obviously, when they’re not, they get in the way and can cause misunderstandings. That’s when we need to be able to shift them to be more effective.

This ability to Filter Shift allows us to see greater complexity in our colleagues and therefore, greater complexity in their contributions. When they are able to do the same, the benefits are exponential. With these skills, we can regularly achieve the maxim of “the sum is greater than the whole of its parts.” I am able to see myself and my ideas differently because I can see them through the eyes of others. That’s transformation.

Transformational Diversity allows us to finally fulfill the promise of Diversity. For decades we have said that a diverse workplace is better, that diverse teams are higher performing and make better decisions. In actuality, drawing from the research of Joe DiStefano, we learn that diverse teams can be the least productive and lowest performing.[3] DiStefano specifically compared diverse teams with homogenous teams and then looked at their performance to see which group did better. He found three types of teams.

The majority of the diverse teams were also the lowest performing teams, falling behind their homogenous counterparts. However, there was also an elite group of performers. Those were the very few diverse teams that outperformed the homogenous teams.

What makes that smaller group of diverse teams so elite and high performing? It’s their ability to interact more effectively with the diversity around them.

Transformational Diversity provides the prescription for Diversity fatigue along with the much-needed traction for our spinning D&I wheels. Most importantly, it helps our organizations and the individuals within them to be their most effective.

This is the new way forward.

[1] Intercultural Development Inventory, IDI LLC, 1998-2011

[2] Intercultural Development Inventory, IDI LLC, 1998-2011

[3] Creating Value with Diverse Teams in Global Management, Joseph J. DiStefano & Martha L. Mazneski, 2000