If you want to make managing easier, make hiring better.

We believe that the most serious organizational weakness in modern organizations is hiring poorly. Companies and managers routinely hire far below the quality we could find, largely because we don’t set standards, we don’t train, we don’t have measured processes, and we don’t improve.

Our organizations have systems to test the quality of raw materials coming in to our plants. We reject anything that is even a little out of tolerance. We have nondestructive testing methods for inbound materials, and for our own manufacturing processes. We have financial standards for investing capital that are incredibly rigorous—and monstrously difficult to prepare for at times. We have rigid standards for expense reporting.

And then, for the most important decisions organizations make—who will work here—we have no formal, communicated standards. Managers are usually not required to go to training. There usually isn’t any approved interview training. If there is either of these, it’s under the auspices of Human Resources. It’s likely much more about legalities than effective decision making. Of course we need to know what questions not to ask. But that will only help us not be sued. It won’t help us make excellent hiring decisions. [If you’re young and at a company that provides good interviewing training, don’t make the mistake of assuming that that’s true everywhere. It’s true almost nowhere. Count yourself lucky, and take advantage of it.]

In the worst cases, we leave the decision to some senior manager who’s never been trained, never been given feedback, has never been assessed on her true positive and true negatives, is never held accountable, and mostly goes with her gut. We’ve tested more than 20 seasoned managers we’ve met over the years who had the reputation for making good gut decisions on hiring. We have never found a single case where they notably outpaced the results of other managers, based on looking at records of true and false positives and negatives.

Hiring without high standards is like trying to make a gorgeous wedding cake substituting raw wheat for flour, while adhering to every other step in the process. The problem with that analogy, though, is no one would eat the cake, because it wouldn’t become a “cake.” But with bad hiring, we end up eating the cake day after day after day of working with our new hire, the poor choice.

We managers make our pain by hiring poorly. We hire poorly, then we complain about our workload because the very people we hired don’t turn out to be as good as they “should” be. They create more managerial work for us, and reduce the time we have available for the projects we think will move our part of our organization forward.

If you feel like you’re always putting out fires, don’t forget in your systemic solution to change those you’re hiring by raising your hiring standards.

Bad hiring is the root cause of so many other downstream issues: performance, retention, succession planning, productivity, and profitability.

Say you hire the wrong person, or not even the “wrong” person, just someone who doesn’t scale as well as you’d like. And because the person doesn’t scale, you can’t give her a team to manage when workload expands. But you need to get more work out of the group she’s in. Because your poor hire can’t get more out of the group you already have, you have to hire more people. And when you hire more people to do work that your competitor does with fewer people, your competitor is more productive and therefore usually more profitable than you. You’re not going to be the market leader if your entire organization is continually repeating the mistake of hiring folks who aren’t good enough now or won’t be good enough to grow with the organization.

All of the above is why if we do decide to hire, our first thought must be to set the hiring bar high.

Before we ever start interviewing, our guiding principle must be to avoid hiring anyone who has the slightest chance of being a hiring mistake. We want the reputation in our industry, and among candidates, that “it’s not easy to get hired there.”

Managers complain to us regularly that they have to go through hundreds of résumés, and it’s time-consuming. [We’ll explain how to screen résumés later.] Why waste time looking at lots of résumés that are sure to be “no’s”? You’ll start with a smaller pile if you raise your hiring standards, because lots of candidates won’t apply, because “several of my friends have interviewed there and didn’t get an offer.”

Tell people in your industry that you have high hiring standards. Tell them that your hiring process is designed to reduce your risk. Tell them that if it’s close, it will probably be a no. Plenty of those who listen will shy away. And those whom you would say no to are hanging around others whom you would also say no to.

But good candidates won’t shy away. Good candidates will actually be drawn toward your opportunities. They’ll know that a high bar for hiring means that the folks you already have are good. They’ll know they won’t be the only top performer on the team. They won’t be Harrison Bergeron, weighted down with rules and processes built to minimize the damage of weak performers, rather than giving top performers opportunities to excel.

And there’s an internal benefit, too. Telling your existing team that the bar is high protects them. Tell them: “You folks are good, and I won’t hire just anybody to work alongside you.”

Now your team won’t shy away from saying no to someone they have doubts about. They won’t just say yes because they heard that one of the candidates is your favorite. They won’t just say yes to an interviewee because they’re desperate for help.

They’ll start looking for reasons to say “no” in an interview. They’ll be looking for areas to be concerned about. Which is why we interview anyway. If you’re looking for reasons to say yes, you’ll find them. But it’s the reasons we should have said no that come back to haunt us.

And we want them looking for problems. If they’re interviewing someone who will be a peer, a big part of their thinking is having help with their workload. But we managers have to know a bigger truth: The only thing worse than an open position is filling it with the wrong person.

Ask any manager who has ever made a bad hire. They’ll tell you: never again.