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Key Takeaways Most small business owners rely on gut instinct when hiring, but that approach becomes costly as the business grows.
Shifting to a data-driven hiring process helps you make smarter, faster and fairer decisions by defining success metrics, tracking performance and continuously refining your hiring model for stronger long-term results.
For many small business owners, hiring starts as a gut-based decision. You meet someone, you like their energy and skillsets, and you think they’ll “fit.” Sometimes, that works out. But as your business grows, that kind of instinctive hiring starts to cost you in more ways than one.
And bad hires are exactly that — costly. In fact, 24% of small business owners share that they made a bad hiring decision in the last two years. At the same time, more than half of small business owners say that hiring is difficult for them.
A data-driven hiring strategy can sharpen your hiring intuition, helping you make smarter, faster decisions using clear metrics that show who will succeed in your business, not just who interviews well.
Here are my recommendations on how to refine your hiring process to be grounded in data from start to finish.
Related: How Big Data Can Help You Find and Hire the Most Elusive Talent
Step 1: Define success before you hire
The most common hiring mistake isn’t picking the wrong person, but instead is not defining what success looks like for the role before you even start looking.
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