If you are in a leadership role, here is a truth that will save you years of frustration: poor hiring decisions are the root of most performance problems. It is not underperformance that causes the biggest headaches. It is the initial decision to put the wrong person in the role. Yet many leaders treat hiring as a formality, a routine task to be delegated or rushed through in between “real” work. That mindset is dangerous. Because what looks like a minor shortcut during recruitment often explodes into major issues later — missed targets, low morale, difficult performance conversations, and costly terminations. Hiring is not an HR task. It is a frontline leadership responsibility. If you are not taking it seriously, you are compromising your strategy before it even gets off the ground.Every bad hire is a silent drag on the business. You don’t always see it immediately, but over time, the signs become impossible to ignore. Goals are not met. Managers spend hours trying to manage someone who should never have been hired in the first place. The truth is, most performance issues in organisations can be traced back to flawed hiring decisions. Whether it is a leader who lacks the strategic thinking needed for their role, a specialist who does not actually have the right technical skills, or a team player who turns out to be toxic — these are problems that started during recruitment. And they could have been prevented.A major reason these problems persist is that organisations continue to use broken and unscientific hiring methods. The interview process, despite being the most widely used selection tool globally, is often the weakest link. Research shows that nearly 90% of interviews are unstructured, meaning candidates are not asked the same questions in the same way, scores are based on gut feel, and the process is left wide open to bias. These kinds of interviews may feel familiar and conversational, but they are dangerously unreliable. They allow confident candidates to perform well, while more qualified, thoughtful ones are overlooked. They also enable personal bias to creep in, leading to decisions based on likability, physical appearance, or shared background rather than job fit.A structured interview process, by contrast, uses job-relevant questions designed to assess specific competencies. It ensures every candidate is evaluated on the same criteria, using a clearly defined scoring system. Take, for example, a high stakes finance role. A well-designed interview might include a question about managing negative free cash flow in a business with seasonal revenue cycles. Without structure, panelists who don’t fully understand finance will guess whether an answer is good or bad. But with a scoring rubric, a poor answer would be defined as one that confuses free cash flow with profit and lacks any meaningful solution. A strong answer, on the other hand, would show deep understanding of cash flow management, link it to funding strategies and investment timing, and tailor the solution to the business context. That’s how structured interviews reduce error and help identify true competence.However, the problem is not just structural. It is also training-related. In many organisations, interviews are conducted by panels that have never received any formal training in how to assess candidates. Executives believe experience alone qualifies them to interview, but that is a mistake. Without proper training, they replicate flawed processes, ask irrelevant questions, and use subjective impressions as a substitute for evidence. What results is not a hiring process. It is a well-practiced amateur ritual. And every time an untrained panel makes a hiring decision, the risk of a costly mistake increases.Even before the interview, damage is often done during the shortlisting process. This is where managers routinely use vague criteria or rely on superficial markers, such as prestigious employers, degrees, or CV buzzwords. But none of that guarantees job success. The key question should always be: what does this job actually require? What knowledge, skills, experience, and traits are essential for success? If you have not answered that with clarity and discipline, your shortlisting process is flawed from the start. A strong candidate might be discarded. A weak one might be advanced because they know someone influential. These are the subtle errors that manifest later as performance issues.l To read full article visit www.theindependent.co.zw.Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and HR consulting firm. — Linkedin: Memory Nguwi, Mobile: 0772 356 361, [email protected] or visit ipcconsultants.com.
