Top 5 Recruitment Mistakes That Companies Make And Their Solutions

Every employer wants to recruit the best talent, but very few look back at the recruitment mistakes committed in the past and try to learn from them. Recruitment is a costly investment. After all, it leads you to the right talent. But, if you don’t analyse your recruitment mistakes early on, you may end up committing them again — moving around in circles without any definitive outcome.

Many employers don’t even realise that they have made any recruitment mistakes during the hiring process. This complicates the process further. Because if you don’t know your recruitment mistakes, how will you even correct them? And thus, the entire hiring process ends up as a gross waste of resources.

To avoid such an eventuality, let us check out the five most common recruitment mistakes employers make, along with their effective solutions.

Not knowing your wants

That’s a terrible recruitment mistake for an employer — to be out searching but not knowing what you need. How can you find something if you are not sure of what to look for? More often, hiring managers hold a general overview of the requirements for the job role. However, they don’t invest that much effort in determining what kind of personal attributes, experience, knowledge, abilities and specific skills the job demands.

It’s almost as if the managers approach the task with their eyes shut, wasting theirs and the candidates’ time. This lengthens the process without generating any favourable outcome and costs time and resources.

Solution: Identify and define your requirements. This will help a recruiter find the right candidates. Your job description should mention the kind of skills and personal attributes you want for the job. This way, you can prioritise your requirements. Furthermore, a list of well-defined specifications builds a positive brand image in the recruitment market and will help you attract the right talent.

Talking more and listening less

You know the interview is headed on the trajectory when you are the one who is doing all the talking in the interview instead of the candidate. It is said that if the interviewer is talking for at least 20% of the length of the interview, then they are selling the job to the candidates, instead of assessing their skills. Plus, excessive talking is a sign of poor preparedness and a lack of focussed questions.

This is one of the common recruitment mistakes that new recruiters make. So, employers should ensure that recruiters listen more deeply than spend their time talking up the company.

Solution: Do not carry a seller’s mindset while recruiting; rather approach recruiting with a buyer’s mindset. Listen intently as much as possible and speak as little as you can. Let the candidate sell. Always remember — your objective is to evaluate the skills and abilities of the candidate to make sure they fit your job role. And, by effective listening, you can achieve your objective. The candidate is here because they are already sold on the job. Now you must ensure that they are fit enough for your position.

Relying more on gut feeling

Most experienced hiring managers tend to stray away from the validated hiring practices; they end up relying more on gut feeling while hiring the candidates. This doesn’t often produce favourable results. There is no correlation between effective selection and hiring experience when it comes to bringing the right people on board.

The job market undergoes constant change. This means that an experienced hiring manager is not more productive than a new hiring manager who follows an effective hiring process. On the contrary, if the new manager follows sound recruitment practices, they will deliver better results than the experienced manager who relies more on their gut feeling.

Intuition and experience are essential, but even more crucial are the validated recruitment processes, such as work samples, simulations and testing. Every feature of the recruitment process must be weighed according to the job requirements and the core values of the company to ensure better results.

Solution: Employers should create an effective recruitment strategy by incorporating various steps that ensure both quantitative and qualitative data collection. Train your hiring managers and recruiters to ensure they use these models of data collection to arrive at definitive solutions. Then, weigh your process for any loopholes or possible discrepancies. Solve the problems and modify the process as and when required.

Widening your funnel rather than funnelling the data

The objective of the recruitment process is to screen out candidates. However, many hiring managers indulge in screening in candidates by only focusing on their singular key attribute and rationalising their shortcomings. For instance, ‘even though the candidate is not good at communication, once they get trained, they will do better sales presentations.’ Such assumptions will only cloud your judgement and make the process lengthier. Plus, you will end up with a bunch of less qualified candidates.

Solution: Employers should train their hiring managers to think like an investigator. They should search for any clues that signify that the candidate is not fit for the job role. A clear job description and awareness of your core values will help the hiring managers find the right talent for your company. Hiring managers should follow a top-down process in recruitment to get better results.

Relying on the candidate’s word

This is one of the serious recruitment mistakes that a recruiter should avoid. Just because your candidate is fluent with communication and has a way with words, doesn’t mean that you should give in to every general or vague response that they provide. It has been observed that many interviewers find it rude to probe their responses with further questions in order to find a conclusive answer that validates the experience, skills and real behaviour of the candidate.

These interviewers simply give in to the initial response of the candidate without much scrutiny. There is nothing wrong in probing. After all, it will lead you to the right answer, which will help you with better recruitment.

Solution: Your mission should be to collect as much data as possible about the candidate. Any vague or general response should be probed upon further until you arrive at a specific and more detailed response. Your objective is to search for the characteristics and skills that will fit the job role. You can inform the candidate before the interview process that your objective is to completely and accurately understand and assess their skills and capabilities.

These are some of the common recruitment mistakes made by companies. With the help of the solutions listed, you can easily solve your issues and make sure that your hiring process generates more definitive results. Alternatively, you can also outsource this process to a trusted recruitment partner who knows to avoid these pitfalls and get you the right hire.