If you often find yourself wondering, “How did this person end up on my payroll?”, chances are you or your team are using one (or more) of these common hiring mistakes.
Even the most capable managers and business owners know that the strength of a company depends on the strength of its people. Yet many leaders who excel in strategy and operations struggle to consistently find and hire top talent.
At Mint Kulca, we’ve seen these patterns repeatedly, and we want to help you avoid them. Below, we expand on the Top 10 wrong hiring methods described in Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, along with insights from our own experience helping clients improve their hiring strategy.
Avoiding these pitfalls could save you endless hours, resources, and frustration.
A hiring decision made purely on instinct is one of the most common and costly mistakes.
Unstructured interviews allow unqualified candidates to fake their way in. Data shows that gut-feel hiring is terribly inaccurate when it comes to identifying top performers.
Instead, use structured interviews that assess measurable competencies.
While collaboration is important, having the entire team interview a candidate without coordination leads to duplicated questions and superficial assessments.
If the team isn’t aligned on the key success factors for the role, the process produces inconsistent results.
Create a structured plan, assign roles for interviewers, and measure candidates against agreed-upon criteria.
Trick questions like “Why are drain covers round?” or “If you were a pizza delivery driver, how would you use scissors?” might reveal cleverness, but they don’t predict on-the-job success.
Ask questions linked directly to skills, competencies, and outcomes relevant to the role.
Some managers spend interviews trying to impress candidates rather than assess them.
When you spend more time talking than listening, you miss valuable insights about fit and capability.
Balance enthusiasm with curiosity and focus on discovering whether the candidate can truly perform the role.
Dropping a piece of paper to test initiative or taking a candidate to a party to gauge social skills might sound clever, but these “tests” are rarely relevant.
Unless the behaviour you’re testing directly ties to job performance, it’s not a reliable assessment method.
Questions like “If you were an animal, which would you be?” have no scientific value.
They may reveal personality, but not performance potential.
Effective interviews focus on real evidence of competence and achievement.
While friendly rapport helps candidates relax, turning the interview into casual conversation offers little insight into their abilities.
A pleasant personality doesn’t equal a top performer.
Cultural fit matters, but so do measurable skills, competencies, and results.
Asking “Would you rather spend Friday night at a party or reading?” tells you nothing about performance in the role.
Interviews should uncover behavioural evidence and job-specific competencies, not personality traits in isolation.
Assessments are valuable tools when used correctly but they’re not a silver bullet.
They should support, not replace, a structured interview process.
Always interpret assessment results in context and involve someone trained to understand how those results relate to performance.
Questions like “If you faced a conflict, how would you handle it?” invite idealised answers, not real insights.
Everyone knows the textbook response but behaviour in the moment matters more than imagination.
Base your evaluations on past behaviour and evidence, not hypothetical scenarios.
Remember: it’s the walk, not the talk, that predicts performance.
All these flawed hiring methods share one assumption: that assessing people is easy.
The truth? It’s not. Seeing candidates for who they really are requires structure, clarity, and consistency.
As Geoff Smart and Randy Street emphasise in Who: The A Method for Hiring, successful hiring is both an art and a science and it starts with having the right process.
At Mint Kulca, we’re passionate about helping leaders and hiring teams adopt the best practices in modern recruitment.
Our Hiring Strategy Platform combines proven methods with technology to help you:
Define success for every role,
Assess candidates objectively, and
Hire top performers 90% of the time.
Stop relying on gut feel and start hiring with confidence.
👉 Let’s build your hiring strategy together.
Book a Demo to learn how Mint Kulca’s tools and expertise can help you identify and hire top talent consistently.