Top 10 most common recruitment mistakes (and how to avoid them)
The stakes of good versus bad recruitment have never been so high. You’ve probably seen some of the statistics : losing a great employee can cost the company 1.5 to 2 times the employee’s annual salary, for competitive markets like IT in Europe, over 500,000 jobs are currently unfilled and there’s an increasing trend in people leaving jobs voluntarily without a job lined up after.
These are only a few of the trends that are making it hard to identify, attract, and retain great talent even when you have a well-oiled recruitment machine. But of course, no hiring process is perfect. And many teams suffer the consequences of more than a few common recruitment mistakes.
Time to weed these common hiring mistakes out of your process! Here we’ll give you a brief overview of the most common pitfalls. Don’t worry, we’ll also offer a few recruiting tips to fix, avoid, or ditch them!
- Emitting radio silence post-offer
You’ve signed your dream candidate and they’re all set to join your company. The only thing left is for them to work out their one month notice period. Your work as a recruiter is done! Another successful hire, signed, sealed, and delivered… right? This is one of the most common recruitment mistakes, and it’s one that’s easy to make. With so many hires on your plate, it’s easy to jump from one process to the next. Unfortunately, just because an offer has been signed, it doesn’t mean the candidate will make it to their first day on the job. Many candidates continue field interviews and may even receive calls from recruiters. Just because they’ve signed your offer doesn’t mean they won’t receive more enticing ones. Radio silence on your end post-offer compounds the issue by creating doubt and uncertainty on the candidate side. Understandably, you may lose some candidates during this wait period if there’s no contact.
Recruitment tip: Start your employee onboarding early and make sure to engage your candidates post-offer. Give them some homework: documents to review, tools to download or learn. You may even consider inviting them to company gatherings so they can get to know the team before joining.
- Canning rejected candidates
It’s hard to justify spending more time on rejected candidates when you’re still trying to hire someone in that position. And more often than not, candidates are rejected and forgotten about. While they may not have been the right fit at the time, some rejected candidates have great potential. This is especially true in processes where you have to choose between two great candidates. They’ve already expressed interest in working with your company and depending on their skills, they may be a great fit for another position. Discarding candidates who are qualified, interested, but not good at this particular time is a huge recruitment mistake.
Recruiting tip: Ask qualified but rejected candidates if you can stay in touch for future opportunities. You can do this either by managing a list manually or adding them to talent pools where you can engage them easily.
- Relying on standardized hiring processes
Every talent acquisition team worth their weight should have a recruitment policy on hand that details their standard hiring procedures. Standardized hiring processes can help your team deal with high volumes of job requisitions. They will also guide them in the right direction when it comes to creating a good candidate experience. But people change, companies change, and so do roles. Relying on fixed, standardized hiring processes can, in some instances, become more of hindrance than a help. Think of the scenario where you have difficulty finding the right candidate- it seems that every candidate you interview quickly receives an offer from another company. If you have too many steps in your process (phone screening, technical test, in-person interview, executive interview), you may be missing out on talent. This is a situation where you may need to be flexible on your processes and perhaps deviate from the standard.
Recruitment tip: Standardized hiring processes exist for a reason, but don’t let them make your job harder than it needs to be. Meet with your recruitment stakeholders regularly to determine which standardized processes work and which ones don’t. Remain open to updating and changing processes for the greater good: hiring the right talent.
- Using a limited recruitment team
Traditionally, HR and recruitment teams have tended to work in relative isolation. They receive the details of a vacancy from a department. Then they get to work trying to find, qualify, and hire the right person for the job! No recruiter needs to be a lone wolf. And keeping recruitment as just an “HR thing” is limiting your potential!
Recruiting tip: Make staff recruitment a team activity. Get your team more involved in the recruitment process. Use their skills, industry expertise, and team knowledge to identify the right talent. Make sure to invite them as users into your talent acquisition platform or ATS so that they can be more involved in the process. As on boarded users, they’ll be able to help you screen CVs, schedule interviews, leave feedback, and more.
- Avoiding candidate feedback
It’s hard to reject candidates and even harder to receive feedback from them after. But it’s a common recruitment mistake to believe that the feedback will always either be negative or useless. You’d be wrong on both counts. Candidate feedback has the potential to take your candidate experience and hiring to the next level. And while you may be tempted only to receive feedback from your successful hires, it’s more important to gather it from the unsuccessful ones.
Recruitment tip: Build a candidate experience survey in your recruitment process. In Recruitee, you can use integrated questionnaires or you can use an external service like Typeform to gather responses. Make sure to regularly report on satisfaction, experiences, and interview feedback from your candidates hired or not
- Giving equal attention to all job promotion channels
In the rush to get your job out on the market, you may be tempted to cover all your bases. Posting your vacancy on every platform, social, premium, or niche, may help you feel like you’ve done your best and you’re reaching the most candidates possible. In reality, however, posting on all job promotion channels is not only unaffordable but may waste your time when it comes to managing the postings. Not all job promotion channels will be relevant for your vacancies, so don’t spend the same amount of time or effort managing postings on them.
Recruiting tip: Use your ATS or talent acquisition platform to start tracking your best-performing channels. Tag candidates by acquisition channel or application source as they come into your system. This way you can generate a report later on that reveals the source of your highest volume of candidates but also the highest quality.
- Letting interviewers “freestyle” it
Many people prefer to “freestyle” interviews. After all, that’s sometimes the best way to get to know candidates. You don’t want to sound like a robot. However, if you at least tailor the questions to the candidate at hand, you’ll be able to dig deeper into the candidate’s skills, qualifications, and experience. Unstructured interviews aren’t necessarily bad. But the consequences of unconscious bias can lead to some pretty serious recruitment mistakes, which is why this mistake is in the top five worst.
Recruiting tip: Set up your own easy-to-follow structured interview question set within your ATS and invite your hiring manager as a user. While you want to allow for a certain amount of flexibility within the interview, ensuring that certain questions are answered will only help you later in the selection process. Include structured interviews into your recruitment policy and make sure to create your templates within your talent acquisition platform for everyone to access.
- Taking too long with referrals
Employee referrals are an extremely powerful tool in any recruiter’s belt. They have the power to speed up your recruitment process, boost employee engagement, and improve employee retention. Despite these benefits, some teams struggle to manage employee referrals appropriately amid other hiring priorities. One of the biggest recruitment mistakes is mismanaging employee referrals. Not treating the referral with care or urgency can erode any trust that was built with the employee.They’ll be unlikely to make another referral, and it will be difficult to engage that employee (or others that are in the loop) in the recruitment process going forward.
Recruiting tip: Build a referral system into your recruitment process, and write it into your recruitment policy. Detail how employee referrals are managed, including: What the referee needs to do to refer a candidate; Who the point of contact is for any referrals; What HR will take care of and how they will keep the referee updated; Timeframe for response and candidate qualification; Any reward scheme (and conditions) for referrals. Detailing a system in your recruitment policy will help avoid any confusion and speed up your process.
- Not pushing back on hiring managers during the job spec
In the traditional hiring model, recruiters play the role of order takers. During the job spec with a hiring manager, the recruiter will get all the information they need to go out and find a selection of potential hires. In this sort of relationship with a hiring manager, it’s difficult for many recruiters to push back on unrealistic requirements. After all, the hiring manager knows what they need, who are you to question them? Not pushing back on hiring managers when there are unrealistic requirements is the second biggest recruitment mistake you can make. Not only will trying to fulfill unrealistic expectations for a candidate set you back in the hiring process, but it can easily double your time to hire. Without a good working job spec, you’ll likely need to double back to re-qualify the position with the manager. Poor job descriptions stemming from the job spec will receive little attention from qualified candidates or too much attention from unqualified candidates. Blunders and time lost from this flawed process can deteriorate your relationship with the hiring manager and any buy-in you built with them. A good hiring manager and recruiter relationship is one of the foundations of a successful hiring process, which earns this hiring mistake a place at the top of the list.
Recruiting tip: Establish trusting and consultative relationships with your hiring managers. And this starts with pushing back during the job spec and sharing your knowledge on the job market they’re operating in. Are they looking for a hard to find skillset? Or experience that may not be currently available in the candidate market? Tell them! It’s important to work as a team: they have the business-know-how and you have the recruitment knowledge required to find their next hire. Make sure that you share your knowledge and experience with them from the beginning in order to work towards your common interest: finding the best candidate!
- Using spreadsheets to manage (even parts of) the recruitment process
Many businesses, especially smaller ones, manage their recruitment processes to some degree using spreadsheets. They’re seemingly a quick, easy way to manage your candidate information including contact details, CV information, hiring process steps, reference taking- the list can go on. Spreadsheets can be a diverse tool, and certainly one you should use… just not to manage your hiring. Why? Well, there are a couple of deal-breakers.
Accessibility: Spreadsheets pose a major risk when it comes to accessibility of processes and records. Unless you share these sheets with the relevant team members, the team may be left in the dark if the recruitment lead is off unexpectedly. The reality is that many teams save spreadsheets containing hiring process details on desktops- it only takes one sick day or an unexpected computer crash to lose valuable data.
Personal data: The most common use of spreadsheets in hiring is to keep track of candidate details. Even when you collect this personal data (phone number, name, email address, etc) with consent, it still falls under the GDPR if it belongs to an EU citizen or is stored on an EU server.
This means that it is not only a security risk- if your laptop gets stolen or server hacked- but it will also need to be maintained according to GDPR. Without automatic deletion of candidate data, you may wind up storing data longer than necessary. Ultimately, keeping candidate data on spreadsheets is not only a hassle but also a risk.
Efficiency: Spreadsheets are a lot of things, but they are not a full-fledged recruitment system. You need to constantly update spreadsheets, which can add countless hours of admin for you or your team. Additionally, if someone is referring to outdated information, it may be the interaction that costs your business a great candidate. With all of the options out there at various price points, there’s no reason to use spreadsheets as a talent acquisition system.
Spreadsheets are a great tool- just not to manage something as important as your recruitment. Recruitment is complex and requires a lot of dedicated attention. Choosing a tool that is designed for mathematical calculations and not really made for this purpose will wind up costing your team as you grow (if not now)- whether that’s in time, money or great candidates. Using spreadsheets in recruitment earns itself its position as the worst recruitment mistake because it is so common and so easy to make. Often teams start out with spreadsheets, as they’re not ready to invest in an ATS or talent acquisition platform. As we all know, old habits die hard. Once you establish a system that works, it’s hard to let go- even when it starts to break at the seams.
Recruiting tip: Invest in a tool that is designed to track your hiring process and engage candidates. Many businesses don’t do this from the start as these tools can cost a lot of money. But the truth is, many ATS or talent acquisition platforms are now affordable for even small businesses. Spreadsheets will wind up costing your team time and your business great candidates. Find a tool that is fit for your purpose and actually facilitates your hiring rather than bringing it down.
Originally published on Recruitee
