Recruiting blunders are real but then that’s alright because even recruiters are humans.
The problem arises when these mistakes turn into a habit. That’s when it gets real dangerous and risky for their business.
What’s worse is, sometimes they don’t even know they’re indulged in poor hiring practices.
So, do you want to know what these are?
Keep reading.
Common recruiting mistakes and ways to reverse them
1. Letting biases control the process:
Recruiters could sometimes accept or reject candidates on the basis of their sexual identity, country of birth, etc., either intentionally or unintentionally.
They become completely blind eyed by their actual qualifications and value adding potential in their/their client’s organization. This can be a major asset loss since you may lose a really competent individual just because of your biases or prejudices.
Solution: Try blind hiring. This is a technique in which you remove personally identifiable information from candidates’ applications, such as their name, age, country of birth, race and sex, and so on, or inform them to remove it before sending it to you, so that you’re only left with data that’s important to you as a recruiter and the job description. This contributes to the reduction of unnecessary biases to prevent rejecting some truly good talent when shortlisting candidates before the final interview. A robust recruiting software can help you boost your blind screening process.
2. Prioritizing experience:
Some recruiters prioritize candidates’ experience over the value-adding abilities that they can bring to the firm.
Agreed, experience is important, but in today’s fast-paced environment, you may lose out on extremely skilled talents who lack years of experience but have the ability and potential to flourish in their job.
Furthermore, hiring applicants only based on their experience might lead to a lack of new ideas and creativity in the company.
Solution: Look for both experience & skills in applicants. But always prioritize their value adding ability and willingness to learn over anything else. Your candidates and clients would respect you more.
3. Not Using a Recruitment Software:
There are recruiters who still use Excel for tracking applicants manually and for other recruitment tasks.
This is super inefficient. Recruitment is already an intensive task, and not investing in a robust recruitment system isn’t a good decision in today’s time.
These software are especially made for recruiters, to make recruitment activities more effective and efficient. They are like super tools that once you start using, you can’t go back.
Solution: One of the best and affordable tools in my opinion is Recruit CRM. It is a an ats software made especially for individual & agency recruiters. You’re welcome! So, In a nutshell, what I would suggest is to stop using makeshift tools & invest in recruitment tools that’ll save you a lot of time.
4. Not following-up with candidates:
There are recruiters who don’t follow up with the candidates after their interview to provide feedback, or simply to provide further updates of the recruitment process. This damages their brand image as a recruiter.
How, you ask?
Well, words spread quickly in the job market.
Especially about the bad experiences. You would never want your reputation to get hurt.
Solution: Following up with candidates not only reduces the chances of errors and miscommunication, it also provides a positive candidate experience, which has several benefits, including increase in quality of your applicant pool.
5. Conducting unstructured interviews:
Unstructured interviews generally are prone to inconsistencies.
The recruiter may ask different questions to different candidates, which may make the evaluation of those candidates incomparable to each other.
The standardization is lost. Thus, resulting in poorer understanding of which candidate would be better suitable for the offered job.
Adding to it, doing unstructured interviews generally consume more time than structured interviews where you ask precise questions.
Solution: To conduct structured interviews, recruiters should first devise a list of questions to ask the candidates. The main goal of these questions should be to assess their skills, knowledge, and other important points specifically related to that job position. Standardizing the process like this would increase the efficiency & increase the chance of getting a quality candidate for your organization/ clients.
Now that you are aware of the hiring practices that may be holding you back, it’s time you streamline recruitment by avoiding common recruiting mistakes!