Has finding high-quality talent become a challenge? Make sure you’re not committing the biggest recruiting mistakes, which only make the process that much harder. Here are some of the most common recruiting mistakes your team can make and how to avoid them.
1. Basic, less-than-compelling job postings
Review a recent batch of your company’s job postings. Do they include only basic information about the role – a dry recitation of responsibilities and a list of minimum requirements?
If so, you may be boring the target audience you’re trying to reach.
Standard job descriptions simply don’t generate enthusiasm among job candidates. Similar to how recruiters skim through resumes and quickly move on if a candidate doesn’t hold their attention, job candidates often make fast decisions about whether to pursue an open position at a company based on the job posting.
Your goals should be to:
- Stand out from the competition
- Inspire attention and interest
- Entice job candidates to apply
To do this, you need to learn how to write a compelling job posting. Offer more information beyond the basics and convey what makes your company special. Adopt the mindset that you’re “selling” choosy job candidates on your company.
- Describe your company’s mission, vision, core values and culture.
- Give job candidates a sense of what their everyday life will be like at your company.
- Include a salary range, if possible.
- Highlight desirable benefits and other unique workplace perks.
It’s also a good idea to review the text of job postings with an eye toward eliminating any unintended biases that could alienate some job candidates or limit who your company reaches.
2. No external advertising and brand management strategy
Find your candidate
This is a common recruiting mistake made by many company recruiters who post a job in the employment section on their website, sit back and wait for the applications to roll in.
But what if your company isn’t on a job candidate’s radar? How are they supposed to find you?
What about passive job candidates who are highly qualified but aren’t even actively searching for new jobs?
First, envision your ideal job candidate:
- Who is this person?
- What type of professional are they?
- How much experience, knowledge and seniority do they have?
- If you were in their position, where would you go to look for a new job?
To identify and reach your desirable job candidates, you must advertise strategically and conduct targeted, proactive outreach.
- Consider both the most popular job search platforms and industry-specific job boards. If you’re recruiting specialized, highly-skilled job candidates, the lesser-known, more niche job boards will be more important.
- Leverage social media, particularly LinkedIn, which can be a powerful research and recruiting tool and platform for targeted job advertisements.
- Tap into your network for referrals.
In some cases, budget constraints can limit your advertising efforts. The point is for you to think through your advertising strategy with a target candidate in mind, and take actions with the highest likelihood for success.
Show your brand
Part of strategic advertising is projecting a consistent brand experience across your website and social media channels. Expect that candidates will research your company once they see your job posting. You want your company’s online presence to reflect the company’s mission, vision and values – and at a minimum project an image of professionalism and legitimacy. Otherwise, they’ll be turned off before ever reaching the application stage, and you’ll lose out on a potentially great hire.
Protect your brand
Also, pay attention to your company’s presence on major review sites, such as Glassdoor, and assign an employee to manage negative reviews – in a polite and professional manner. Don’t let just one side of the story dominate and allow poor impressions of your company to sit in the public domain unaddressed.
3. Lack of preparation
Earlier, we mentioned that recruiters can breeze through resumes – sometimes spending mere seconds reviewing them – before making decisions about job candidates. This can be a problem leading up to interviews with job candidates.
Don’t wing it and think that you can get the intel needed to make the most informed recruiting and hiring decisions.
To properly vet job candidates, recruiters must take the time to prepare.
- Start with a standard group of questions that you will ask each candidate during the screening conversation, and make a point of using these witheach person that you are interviewing.
- Supplement the standard questions above with some targeted, custom, thoughtful questions based on a candidate’s unique background.
- Assess employment gaps and craft questions to reveal the reasons behind them.
- Evaluate the candidate’s average company tenure and career progression, and craft questions around that history if necessary.
From a job candidate’s perspective, a recruiter’s obvious lack of preparation or questions about basic information from their resume can be construed as disinterest and lack of respect for the interviewee’s time. This can lead to a negative impression of your company.
Recruiters should also be prepared to answer job candidates’ questions. Remember, candidates are not the only ones being interviewed. This is a two-way conversation – they’re also trying to decide if they want to work in this role for your company. An inability to anticipate and answer their questions could leave a feeling of uncertainty and lack of trust.
4. Predictable interview questions
Recruiters have long turned away from yes/no interview questions and have instead embraced behavioral interview questions that enable them to extract more in-depth information about who a job candidate is and how they think.
The problem is that, by now, some behavioral questions have become so common and expected that job candidates have a polished, rehearsed answer ready. Examples:
- What’s been your biggest challenge?
- What’s your biggest strength (or weakness)?
What’s been your biggest accomplishment?
These questions no longer catch candidates off guard and instead capture a scripted response.
Work to elicit or encourage candidates to showcase their interpersonal communication skills and ability to think on the spot by asking less predictable questions. Examples:
- What’s something that makes you proud?
- How would you describe yourself in one word, and why?
- What’s your biggest pet peeve?
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with a manager, and what did you do about it?
- Tell me about a time when you failed, and what did you learn from it?
- What makes you memorable, apart from skills and training?
- When you one day look back on your career so far, what will be your biggest success?
5. Unconscious bias
Everyone, including recruiters, can carry unconscious biases about other people based on their own individual experiences. For example, recruiters, hiring managers and other business leaders may not realize that they:
- Prefer job candidates who they perceive to be more like them, or with whom they share outside interests
- Dismiss candidates who don’t align with their individual preferences
- Fail to consider candidates outside their preconceived notion of who’s right for the role
- Prioritize experience over talent and knowledge
Allowing unconscious biases to influence employment decisions can cause a company to potentially hire the wrong candidate for a job. It can also result in a homogeneous, static workplace plagued by groupthink and lack of innovation.
To avoid this:
- Screen resumes using a standard set of rules. Or use an applicant tracking system to automatically screen resumes for alignment with an open position.
- Use a standard set of main interview questions for each candidate in order to create a consistent experience and make it easier to compare candidate responses (while still allowing for custom questions based on the candidate’s background).
- Rely on facts and objective information, not your gut feelings.
- Look not only for a candidate who will fit well within the established workplace culture, but who could potentially bring something new and unique to the culture.
- Involve more than one person in the recruiting process to broaden perspectives and reduce the risk of one person’s bias causing undue influence.
6. Poor candidate care
It really comes down to this: Treat job candidates the way you would want to be treated if you were in their position. Demonstrate common courtesy.
It seems like an easy recruiting mistake to avoid, but many job candidates report these experiences with companies:
Too many hoops to jump through
Understandably, companies want to be thorough in their recruiting efforts. But when you require overly lengthy applications, multiple interviews or too many assessments, you may scare away job applicants.
Job candidates don’t want a tedious, exhausting experience that will be overly disruptive to their schedule.
Make your application brief and to the point – just long enough to get the information you need to initially evaluate a candidate. Overall, the process should be user-friendly and pleasant.
When you decide to interview a job candidate, communicate up front every step that will be involved in the hiring process. People want to know what to expect so they can plan accordingly and make informed decisions.
Ask job candidates if they’re in the final stages of consideration for any other positions or if there are any other issues that may require you to expedite your company’s process.
Lack of respect for their time
Building on the discussion about making the application process user-friendly, demonstrate respect for job candidates’ time.
Join calls or arrive at interviews on time. Stick to scheduled times – don’t let an interview drag on for an additional 45 minutes. Remember that job candidates often have to get back to their current job as quickly as possible.
If something happens to cause you to be late, or you need to reschedule, let them know with as much advance notice as possible. Apologize with grace should you be a few minutes late in joining the meeting.
Lack of communication
For a job candidate, it’s incredibly frustrating and discouraging to apply for a position and then hear nothing – especially if that candidate has progressed further along in the hiring process. Whatever your reasons – you’re busy, backlogged with applications, having trouble deciding between candidates or you just want to avoid an awkward conversation – it’s never acceptable to leave candidates hanging without an answer.
Often, they’ll lose interest in the position and move on – and you’ll miss out on a great candidate.
More often than not, they’ll develop a negative view of your organization. Over time and across many job candidates, this can hurt your company’s reputation.
Maintain regular and timely communication with the top job candidates to keep them updated on their status and where you are in the hiring process. Of course, this can be challenging when you have several open positions and hundreds of applicants for each position. An applicant tracking system can be helpful in managing candidates, overseeing their progress, documenting their interactions with your company and sending automated messages and reminders on your behalf.
Be personal in your communication. Use first names, not “Dear Candidate.” You want people to feel valued, not like a number.
When a candidate has not been selected to move to the next step, notify them as soon as possible. Thank them for their time and let them know that they’ll be considered for future positions that align with their skills and experience.
7. Failure to recruit from within
Often, recruiters are so focused on finding the perfect candidate “out there” that they overlook the people who are already very familiar with their organization and have an established performance track record: current employees.
For your current employees, hopefully you have developed:
- A promotion policy
- Career paths (a map of how they can move within your organization to develop specific skills)
- Succession plans
- A process for internal job applicants
When a position opens up at your company, there may already be an internal job candidate who’s suitable, which can reduce your organization’s recruiting costs and time. Knowing that they can move around – and up – within the organization can also keep employees engaged and motivated.
Furthermore, encourage employees to become brand ambassadors and refer their own contacts.
- Make job postings easily shareable and mobile-friendly.
- Offer referral incentives.
8. No adjustment for the remote era
Remote work has introduced new opportunities for recruiting mistakes and other hiring challenges. Make sure your business is prepared for fully remote recruiting and hiring, and has thought through each step of the process and how it will work at your company.
A few quick tips:
- Pay even more attention to job candidates’ cues and body language in video interviews.
- Take extra measures to minimize distractions at home during video interviews. Let candidates know of any potential distractions – such as children, pets or deliveries – at the beginning of the interview.
- Evaluate which interview questions you should ask candidates for remote positions.
Summing it all up
Many companies make the same biggest recruiting mistakes, and it can impact their ability to find and hire the right job candidate. It can also diminish their reputation in the job marketplace. But by taking the appropriate countermeasures, you can be more successful in procuring high-quality talent.
- Craft eye-catching and interesting job postings
- Advertise strategically
- Prepare well
- Ask out-of-the-box questions
- Reduce the risk of unconscious bias
- Treat candidates courteously
- Recruit both internally and externally
- Adjust for remote hiring
As an extra measure, you may consider hiring a recruiting professional to further mitigate opportunities for errors and make your recruiting processes more efficient and successful.
Now that we’ve covered the biggest recruiting mistakes, what happens once a job candidate joins your company? For more information about preventing common missteps with employees, download our free e-book: 7 most frequent HR mistakes and how to avoid them.