Are You Hiring Wrong? (It’s Fixable) with Mary Beth Meadows & Katie Saliba

When a hire goes wrong, the first instinct is to blame the candidate pool. The talent is bad. Nobody wants to work. The market is impossible. Sometimes that is true. More often, the problem started earlier and closer to home, inside the process the company uses to hire in the first place. 

In this episode of People-ing with Purpose, Mary Beth Meadows and Katie Saliba make the case that hiring is a system, not a single event, and that most hiring problems are not actually hiring problems. They are role clarity problems, urgency problems, communication problems, and process problems that show up in the interview room because nobody fixed them upstream. The episode moves through the full arc: why the panic that follows a resignation leads to bad decisions, what a job description is actually for, why the best candidates are almost always employed and will not wait for you to get organized, and what the interview itself should and should not look like. 

The core argument holds across every section: a better hire almost always starts earlier in the process than most companies think. This episode is a practical working guide for anyone who has ever made a hire they regretted or lost a candidate they wanted. 

What You'll Learn: 

Mary Beth and Katie discuss: 

1. Why hiring gets treated like an isolated event instead of an operating system, and why urgency is the most common root cause of bad hires 
2. What to do the moment someone resigns, starting with asking the departing employee to update their own job description 
3. Why job titles and descriptions matter for search visibility, AI pipelines, and confidentiality when replacing someone quietly 
4. The difference between what a candidate needs to bring to the table and what can be trained after they start 
5. How employer branding and cultural fit show up in job postings, and why culture is almost never something you can teach 
6. What slow hiring costs in a market where the best candidates are already employed and not waiting 
7. Why ghosting candidates after the process is disrespectful and how a single direct communication changes the outcome 
8. How to read a resume using a yes/no/maybe framework, what red flags actually look like, and how to evaluate skills and attributes separately 
9. What an interview should actually accomplish: behavioral questions, open-ended questions, and the mistake of reading the job description back to someone 
10. The interest level question every interviewer should be asking at the end, and what a nine or ten actually tells you 
11. What a strong hiring system looks like start to finish 

If your company is actively hiring right now, this episode is worth sharing with anyone involved in the process. A better hire almost always starts with a better system, and a better system starts with clarity that most companies skip because they are moving too fast. For support with recruiting, staffing, and the people infrastructure that makes growth sustainable, visit PREmployerInc.com or PartnerWithExperts.com. 

Connect with PRemployer

• Visit our website 
• Subscribe to our blog
• Connect with our hosts on LinkedIn: 
  • Katie Saliba 
  • Mary Beth Meadows 

Transcript

Introduction 

Mary Beth Meadows  (00:00) 

Welcome to Peopling with Purpose, a podcast dedicated to helping companies manage staffing and HR. Each week, we'll offer insights to simplify your HR processes and discuss challenges people face to help you find, retain, and engage the best talent. We're your host from PR Companies. I'm Mary Beth Meadows. 

Katie Saliba  (00:21) 

And I'm Katie Saliba. PR Companies is a family of companies headquartered in Southeast Alabama. We're dedicated to helping businesses maximize their success through leveraging their human capital. Join us as we share our favorite staffing and HR strategies and help you drive business growth through your most valuable asset, your people. 

Katie Saliba  (00:43) 

Welcome back to Peopling with Purpose. Today we're tackling a challenge almost every business faces: hiring. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (00:50) 

When hiring doesn't go well, it's easy to blame the candidate pool. But often the real problem isn't the candidates. It's the hiring process itself. 

Katie Saliba  (00:57) 

In this episode, we're exploring why hiring should be viewed as a system, not just an interview. From unclear job descriptions to slow decision-making and reactive hiring, small mistakes can lead to costly outcomes. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (01:10) 

We'll talk about what companies get wrong, why experience isn't always the same as impact, and how a better candidate experience can lead to better hires. 

Katie Saliba  (01:17) 

If you're involved in hiring, or will be soon, this conversation will give you practical ways to strengthen your process and make smarter hiring decisions. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (01:25) 

Let's get into it. 

Why Hiring Problems Start Before the Interview 

Katie Saliba  (01:33) 

All right. Here we go talking about hiring again, our favorite subject. Today's episode is about hiring problems and why they start long before you even make the hire. To start out, why is hiring treated like an isolated event instead of an entire operating system? The first thing that comes to my mind is time. 

Katie Saliba  (02:01) 

When someone places their notice, all of a sudden you're like, boom, the two-week timer is on. Companies start to feel the pressure. I hate to say it, but a lot of times they've hired for this position before, maybe it's a regular recurring position, but not a lot of thought gets put into it in that moment. It becomes: time to get a body in here. The most common assumption is, okay, if we find the right person, the problem is just solved. Let's just hurry up and hire somebody. There's a lot of danger in hiring from an urgency standpoint. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (02:37) 

We see it happen over and over. Nobody ever comes into work anticipating they're going to get somebody's notice. Katie and I are both time management people. We love a to-do list, we love a calendar, and I've never met a leader yet who has 'accept resignation' on their schedule. People run out of time. They get freaked out, because immediately, as you said, that timer feels palpable. Two weeks. 

Katie Saliba  (03:14) 

Even if you kind of know it's coming. I am a planner, I am very organized, and I'm immediately thinking: if I don't get this filled in two weeks, what is my plan? You kick into high gear, but you can't help but feel like, I need to get somebody in here soon. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (03:31) 

And the average business cannot afford to have extra people on the bench in case they lose one. This is a universal challenge. Every business, when you get that notice, or the hint of the notice, or just a weird feeling that it might be coming. Knowing that time is always of the essence, what are some ways hiring problems start before we even get to the interview? One of the biggest is the unclear role. There's no real job description. And frequently there are multiple influencers who have a say in the hire, and misalignment of their expectations is a common problem. 

Katie Saliba  (04:41) 

Nobody wants to talk about this, but why did the person leave? Did they feel like they were doing things the job wasn't originally sold as? Did the nature of the job change? As a manager, you think about your next move. Take a step back and look at what this person was actually doing. Because that may not have been what the original job was. The job has expanded. And I don't think anyone really wants to look back at what happened. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (05:11) 

One of the best things you can do when you get a notice is take the job description of the person who just resigned and kick it back to them. Ask them: can you help us update what you're actually doing? Use that as the fresh starting point. Particularly in small companies, duties get moved around to play to people's strengths. Core functions stay with people, but a lot of ancillary tasks shift. Especially when somebody's been with you for a while, their job description is probably inaccurate. They've been here eight years and things have changed. So start there, capture what's actually happening, and then think about what are the things that require experience versus attributes? What's teachable versus what has to come to the table? In our organization, one non-negotiable is character. Integrity, honesty, accountability. That's not something we can train and it's not something we're willing to forego. 

Job Titles, Descriptions, and Employer Branding 

Katie Saliba  (06:50) 

On the note of job titles and job descriptions: why do they matter more than companies think? If your titles are so unique to what you do that nobody on the internet can figure out what that person's actually doing, you have an application problem before you have a hiring problem. If people don't know what the job is, it won't make sense to them. And when we're talking about AI, it's hard to build a pipeline for a position if your job descriptions and titles are unclear. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (07:40) 

If it's obscure, it's gonna be difficult to make it make sense to people. And the flip side: what if you're recruiting for a position where you're planning to replace someone? Super-specific job titles can give that away. It's very difficult to maintain confidentiality if your titles are unique to your internal language. The internet and AI are both big databases of keyword searches. You want job titles that are clear and searchable, not flowery or overly proprietary. That's just marketing 101. 

Katie Saliba  (08:38) 

Even the job descriptions. It should not be hard for job seekers to read a description and determine whether they can do the job. I harp on this. I don't want it to be three pages long. I want job seekers to understand what they're getting into. Keep it simple. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (09:03) 

I love job descriptions that start with one or two sentences about the purpose of the position. Sometimes we're too quick to jump into the skill checklist: they need to know QuickBooks, they need to do AP/AR. But what if that's only 25% of the job? If the main job is managing the people who do those things, lead with that. What will this person spend 80% of their time doing? That helps candidates understand what the day actually looks like. People are smart. People can read. If we lay it out clearly, the right people will self-select in. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (10:02) 

And branding also matters. Culture is king. You want to articulate clearly what the position does and what skill sets are needed, but you also want to describe what your company is all about. How do you attract cultural fit? We ran recruiting ads a while back for recruiters specifically that leaned into how fast-moving and quick-thinking this environment is. We were joking about the Celsius and Alani drinkers who talk the paint off the wall. And that kind of specificity tells the story. People either think that sounds exactly like me, or not at all. That's the point. Cultural fit is most important, and you have to find ways to communicate it in the posting itself. 

Katie Saliba  (11:24) 

Even if they're good at the job, it's just not gonna be a fit. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (11:28) 

Can we come back from a bad cultural fit? Typically not. It's not something you can train. It's what are those unique things about the company that either draw people in or repel them away. 

Katie Saliba  (11:59) 

Cultural fit is important to most companies and often hard to describe. The longer we work with companies, it becomes clear what makes a great employee for them. But it takes a while to get there and be able to explain it to others. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (12:31) 

One of the best ways is to ask your employees what they think is unique about the culture. Use their words in your static ads, your video ads, social posts. A current employee testimonial that starts with 'I like working here because' is one of the most effective things you can put in a job posting. 

What Slow Hiring Costs and Why Candidates Go Dark 

Katie Saliba  (12:54) 

The point of this first section is: pause before you dive into hiring. Understand why the role is vacant. Look at the actual job description. Don't just re-post the most recent ad. But what does slow hiring cost you on the flip side? 

Katie Saliba  (13:00) 

The most obvious thing: the good candidates are gone. They don't hang around for you to decide. A lot of strong ones ask in the interview: what's your timeline? When can I expect to hear back? If they follow up once, maybe twice, and they're not feeling movement, they go. They go to somebody that's sure about them and ready to make a decision. It starts to look like the position isn't even really open. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (13:57) 

And there's a certain level of distrust job seekers have. Some companies run what's called an evergreen posting, a job ad that stays up all the time whether there's an actual opening or not, specifically to keep the pipeline going. But people are wise to it. They think: they can't always have a front desk position open. Either they're not actually hiring or it's not a great place to work. And over and over, we find that the best applicants are working. If they're employed and you're trying to get their attention, you've got a nibble, but then you don't set the hook. They swim on by. 

Katie Saliba  (15:10) 

Passive candidates are a dance we play all the time. They require more work, more communication. They have a job. You're trying to sell them on their next one. And if the process looks disorganized, job seekers start to wonder what it looks like on the inside. Really. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (15:40) 

And they're not going to want to come. It's disrespectful to engage with somebody about something as significant as making a job change and then leave them hanging. It's just disrespectful. My advice, and we tell people this all the time: say something. You can say, we're very interested but we need to put this on pause for 30 days, can I reach back out then? That's appropriate. You can say, we're not interested. That's appropriate. You can say, I'd like to interview you but I can't do it this week. The number one mistake is holding off because you're not ready to interview right this minute. Candidates who are working have to plan for an interview anyway. You don't have to interview them today. You just have to say something. Because when you leave people in the dark, that is saying something. And it's not what you want to tell them. 

Resume Screening: Yes, No, Maybe 

Mary Beth Meadows  (17:03) 

Let's talk about resumes. When deciding whether a resume is in, out, or pause, you've got to sort: yes, I want to interview them; no, I don't; maybe, if the first two groups don't pan out. Look for red flags. Job hopping. Career changes that don't make sense. Someone who was an RN for ten years and is now a part-time Papa John's delivery driver. Something happened. Job gaps, state changes that have no visible explanation. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (17:50) 

Now, there could be good reasons. Someone moving a lot might be married to the military. Let me say: military spouses are some of the most resilient, brightest, best hires you can make. It could be a slam dunk. But if there's no clear reason, it's a flag. And go back to the job description. They may not have done exactly your job, but do the skills required to succeed in your role match what they've actually done? We hired a recruiter not long ago who had zero recruiting experience on his resume. But there were things he had done that showed he had the skills that translate. And he's been wildly successful. 

Katie Saliba  (19:12) 

It was very clear from his resume and the interview that he's a figure-it-out guy. And we love that here. Recruiters are figuring it out all day long. So look for skills and attributes, not just titles and industry. 

The Interview: Questions That Actually Tell You Something 

Katie Saliba  (19:41) 

The interview is so important, and you can't just ask blanket questions. This person could be on your team in a couple of weeks. If you only do one interview, this is it. You're building rapport with someone who may be reporting to you shortly. Screen for what actually matters. For us, integrity is non-negotiable. So we ask behavioral questions about deadlines, about handling conflict, about how they react when someone is angry. Those are things I need to know. 

Katie Saliba  (20:26) 

I ask how comfortable they are delivering bad news, or making decisions without a chain of command above them. We make a thousand decisions a day here. If they look frazzled by that question, they're probably not my person. You have to know your job intimately, and the situations they'll be in, to properly screen for the right things. Mary Beth and I are big on behavioral questions, open-ended questions. They have to tell you something. They have to explain. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (21:05) 

When you ask those questions, you learn so much. I had a conversation with an industrial client who loves to ask: if you found a hundred dollar bill on the plant floor, what would you do with it? She says the honest people do not hesitate. They immediately say they'd give it to their supervisor. The people who look up to the right or left before answering, she's already gotten her answer. So body language matters too. Interviewing can be uncomfortable if it's not something you do often. There are tutorials. Practice. And the number one mistake is reading the job description back to the candidate and asking if they can do each thing. A string of yes answers tells you nothing. My favorite opening question is: tell me something about yourself. It puts people at ease, helps build rapport, and it's very telling what people choose to reveal first. 

Katie Saliba  (22:37) 

The way people answer that is so interesting. Some people lead with where they grew up, their kids, their church. Others go straight into their professional background. It's different every time. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (22:49) 

Or they immediately tell you about their divorce. In which case, thank you for sharing. 

Katie Saliba  (22:59) 

All that to say, make sure you're screening for the right things and that it feels like a conversation. I spend time asking questions at the start, but by the end we talk about the position and the company too, because you want it to be a fit for them. I explain how fast-paced it is, how chaotic the day can be. I want people to be prepared. And at the end, ask their interest level. Are they as fired up about you as you are about them? Tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in this position. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (23:54) 

And if they're not a nine or a ten, you need to keep looking. Nobody says I'm a one. The scale really runs between four and seven, so four is really a one and seven is really a five. You want them to buy in. This is a collaborative process. To build longevity and retention, it has to be a fit on both sides. And there's a big difference between the five cultural things you need and the five skill set things you need. If someone is a cultural fit and missing a skill that can be trained, you can make that work. It's very difficult to do it the other way around. Build your list of ten: five cultural things, five skill set things. Know which is which before the interview starts. 

Don't Ghost the Candidates You Don't Hire 

Katie Saliba  (25:33) 

This is the number one complaint I hear from candidates: being ghosted. When you fill the position, close it out. Tell the people you interviewed but didn't hire. Thank them for their time, let them know you've gone a different direction. People do not like being left unread. I would feel the same way. 

What a Strong Hiring System Actually Looks Like 

Mary Beth Meadows  (26:10) 

So to bring it home: the components of a strong hiring system. Clear role definition. Accurate job description. A job posting that speaks to your culture, not just the requirements. Make time for it. Block it in your schedule: this is when I review resumes, these are the days I interview. Build it in. Keep the process moving. Keep candidates in the loop throughout. And treat candidates' time with respect. If you're asking someone to take paid time off to meet with you, try to meet them where they are when you can. Intentional screening. A checklist. Prepared interview questions. And a communication process that reflects your values throughout. 

Katie Saliba  (27:47) 

And if you're sitting here thinking, where do I find resources for all of this? SHRM is available online. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (27:57) 

Society of Human Resource Management. Largest HR association in the US. 

Katie Saliba  (28:01) 

There are local HR groups. We have a great one here called WORMA. There's AI. Don't be scared to throw something into AI to help you draft a job posting. Tell it who you are and what you're looking for and it'll scale. Just make sure the prompts sound like you. Social media. All sorts of tools and articles and Instagram accounts dedicated to HR. Consulting with people you trust. And of course, there's just hiring professionals like us. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (28:37) 

We're here for you if you need us. 

Closing 

Katie Saliba  (28:40) 

Today's been a great episode about hiring. Just make sure you're stopping before you dive in. If it's your team, it's worth pausing to figure out what you're actually looking for before you start. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (28:55) 

Great hires make a real difference. Use what we've shared with you today and go get yourself a great one. 

Katie Saliba  (29:07) 

Thank you for tuning in to Peopling with Purpose, a PR Companies podcast. You can always get more information at PREmployerInc.com and PartnerWithExperts.com. 

Mary Beth Meadows  (29:18) 

Be sure to like and follow us on social media, and you can find us everywhere you listen to podcasts. Until next time, happy peopling.