Six Hiring Mistakes Most Companies Make

You get more done with three people who fit together than with a fourth who doesn’t belong. Patrick Lencioni, The Ideal Team Player The gaming industry is going through a period of massive change. Layoffs are sweeping across companies of all sizes, budgets are tightening, and hiring managers are under more pressure than ever to get things right.

With fewer open roles and more talent on the market, you’d think hiring would be easier. It’s not. The high stakes mean that hiring mistakes have never been costlier.

When I first became a hiring manager, I focused purely on technical ability. I hired a person if they could do the job better than other candidates. It took me years—and some painful lessons—to realize that skill alone isn’t enough.

Here are the six biggest hiring mistakes I’ve been guilty of myself - continue to see other companies make. 1. Hiring Friends Most studios in the world start the hiring process by going through the network of their team.

There’s a danger in that. I was once leading a studio that parted ways with six out of the last eight hires. That’s not a stat any of us was proud of.

So we dug deep into what was going wrong and how we could correct it. The reason? We didn’t follow our hiring process.

We hired friends of our existing employees, assuming they’d be a seamless fit. Unfortunately in our case, that meant we didn’t conduct proper interviews, didn’t test the candidates, and didn’t even align internally on the job description. " Hiring friends works—but only when they go through the exact same process as everyone else.

Don’t skip the hiring process.   2. Not Testing for Cultural Fit After we got back to following a structured hiring process, our issues eased—but not entirely.

Turns out, we were over-indexing on resumes and technical tests. We focused on what candidates could deliver, not how they preferred to work as a part of a team . A bit of an over-correction, you might say.

That’s when we introduced a structured approach to assessing cultural fit. We defined the traits we wanted in team members and tested them during interviews. As an example, one of the traits we screened for was “hunger”.

" We looked for answers that demonstrated self-motivation and a willingness to go above and beyond when necessary.   At the same time, we watched for red flags—people who bulldozed over others or lacked self-awareness. While cultural tests are by no means fail-proof, they do help the team to align on what they expect from each other and their co-workers.