A bad hiring manager in the competitive Bangkok market can be disastrous for a company.  Unfortunately, the people in charge of selecting the HR manager likely have little experience in human resources so they look for all the wrong things.  At Bangkok Executive Search, we have come across lots of hiring managers who may look good on “paper” yet are poor choices for any organization.  So how do you know if you’ve made a bad hire for your company and what are the warning signs you can look for prior to making the hire?

First, you should consider your HR professionals as “ambassadors” for the company.  They will be a critical in for your efforts to hire top professionals and they will likely be representing the company at various public events.  In knowing this, it helps to hire attractive people as they are the face of the organization.  In many ways, it may be the most high profile job in the company as every hire in the organization will likely be introduced to this person during the interview and recruitment process.

Second, does this person have charisma and a good personality?  These qualities are important because this may be the most important sales person in the organization.  Consider this, if the company needs the best Marketing Director in Bangkok, does this person have the ability to persuade a very successful employed professional to interview for an opening at your company?  Next, are they able to “close the deal”, meaning getting top performers to accept the job offers extended to them.   In talking with our clients, we tell them that it doesn’t take any talent to get someone to accept a job who is looking for a job (yes, that means people found through job board posting sites).  It takes talent to know who the top performers are within the industry, get them interested in your opening and to eventually say “yes” to your job offer.

Third, does the HR professional efficiently use people’s time during the interview process?  In talking with hiring managers in Bangkok, we ask them to walk us through their hiring timeline and what their recruitment strategy is for key openings.  When people tell us that they do not have a shortlist of candidates for potential openings, we know we have a problem already.  As Bangkok Executive Search, our team of executive search consultants all had hiring experience when we worked on the corporate side and it was standard operating procedure to have a list of perhaps ten to fifteen people for every critical position within our organizations.  As we tell our clients, good human resource professionals are proactive, bad one are reactive and since time is money, you can’t have someone in place who is always responding to surprises.

Next, when the person tells us they use the job boards and always get a huge response for every opportunity, we know there is a problem.  A good hiring manager is always very surgical in their approach to recruitment.   Their candidate pools consist of the best employed professionals and they already know who they are before the opening ever occurs.  A bad hiring manager on the other hand, has no idea who the best people are in the industry.  They just pay for postings on a variety of job board sites and spend weeks sifting through the piles of resumes they received.  In their mind, having a large number of applicants is a good thing as they believe it will increase the company’s chances of hiring a top performer.  The truth is, if people are coming to you for a job, that’s a bad thing as good companies target great people by approaching them instead.