When you're trying to build your ideal team the first thing you look for is experience.  Has the candidate held a similar job or performed similar tasks?  And you’re looking for experience because you’re thinking about the current workload and the need for someone right away to handle the responsibilities the previous employee performed.  

You think “if I have somebody with experience, I'm going to spend less time training” (mistake #1).  

So to find the most experienced candidate you look at their resume (mistake #2).  

I tell my clients, the only thing that has more fiction than a resume, is maybe a Harry Potter book.  Not that candidates mislead but every single company uses different language to define tasks.  Your tasks may not be an “apples to apples” comparison to the tasks the candidate performed at company X.  If somebody has experience in your industry, they were trained to handle issues the way their previous employer wanted things completed—which likely is not the way you want tasks completed.  

How to solve this conundrum? The most important quality to recruit is character. Character is a quality you can't train.  People with the right character will learn the position and excel faster than employees who have marginal character but know the position. They will also stay longer on the job because they feel at home in the company’s culture.  

However, it’s important to remember that character isn’t the only indicator of a superstar employee. The time you spend training tasks unique to your business is critical. A question you could ask is, how much of an impact would it have on your company’s profitability if your training system covered everything from culture, terminology, positional performance standards, and advancement plans? New hires would acclimate and perform at an accelerated rate.  How does your business test for character and cultural fit?