If you are an HR or hiring professional, you know the complexity of hiring new talent. The whole process, from sourcing candidates to onboarding them, can be very frustrating and tedious, especially in a hybrid workplace setting. There are many important factors to keep in mind, like choosing candidates whose character and thoughts align with the company’s vision and culture.
Recruiting an unfit person can reduce the fluency between teams and slow down the growth of departments and organizations. As per LinkedIn, bad hires in a company reduce other employees’ morale by 32% and productivity by 36%. Regardless of your company type or size, creating and enforcing a transparent and effective hiring process is essential.
If you are looking for the most overlooked mistakes recruiters make during hiring, then you are reading the right post.
Common Hiring Process Mistakes
Different challenges like a talent shortage or poor workflow can result in a terrible talent acquisition approach. So, before beginning your next candidate search, you must ensure that you don’t perform the following mistakes during recruitment.
1. Rushed Hiring
When important and skilled employees leave your organization, HR managers and recruiters are eager to fill that position. Now, this is an important step; however, it is difficult and tedious to find a highly experienced worker in a rush. In addition, filling gaps too quickly may overburden your existing employees, leading to resentment.
A better approach is to discuss the open position with the department managers or other involved team members. This helps you determine the ideal qualities and behaviors that a good candidate will have. Make sure there is enough time to select the right candidate and for the hiring process to be completed efficiently.
2. Poor Skills Evaluation
It is not possible to judge candidates properly and evaluate whether they are a fit or not just based on their resumes or CVs. Specifically, when hiring a technical candidate, evaluating their skills is a very important yet very lengthy process. As a result, the hiring process often gets prone to implicit bias, such as experience, capabilities, age, religion, etc. Your organizational culture will be adversely affected due to this.
To deal with this issue, you can use recruitment technology to set up coding challenges, logical and technical tests, group programming, hackathons, etc. This will help assess diverse skills, find suitable candidates, and check behavior and character easily.
3. Living Behind in Workplace Technology
The modern workplace also requires technology to survive in the competitive talent market. Employees don’t want to work in a place that is living behind and feels like a dead-end when it comes to innovation. Rather, they love to work with advanced technologies that can help enhance their skill set.
This helps organizations increase engagement levels and reduce their employee turnover ratio. With automated technology, workers can simplify their jobs, save time, and improve accuracy, all of which will positively impact the business’ bottom line.
4. Comparing Experience and Education
One of the blunders while hiring people is comparing their educational qualifications and experience gained. Both are completely separate topics and should be treated as such. While educational qualification allows a person to excel in their academic background and helps build specific skills, work experience is something that will be valuable in the professional realm.
So you should not evaluate candidates based on only academics or experience — you have to consider both. When building the hiring process, you must include steps in which the qualifications and experience are separately gauged. For example, when assessing qualifications, you can simply design a knowledge-based test, and for experience, you can go for a cognitive or reasoning-based test.
5. Following Only a Specific Skill Set
An inadequate or misleading job description attracts impractical expectations, confusion, underqualified candidates, and unhappy teammates when hiring and onboarding applicants. Not having a solid idea of a job position, responsibilities, or the skills essential for candidates to perform well will make them have second thoughts about joining your company. For you, preserving the value of your employer brand is a priority, and having clear expectations from the candidate will help you to do so.
To solve this, you should:
- Talk to the manager in which the new member will be working for to collect accurate data for the job description.
- Be clear in conveying the expectations of the job position and the requirements of the team.
- Contain practical skills as well as limited and necessary qualifications not to overburden the candidate or scare them away.
- Include the right mix of job-related skills and soft skills.
6. Outsourcing to an Unqualified Agency
Hiring the right people for your organization determines how well your business will prosper in the future. One of the biggest mistakes you will make as a recruiter is giving this responsibility to an outsourcing agency that is not qualified to hire the best candidates for you.
If your organization needs help hiring, it's best to work with a talent partner who can be dedicated to your organization, immerse themselves in your culture, and committed to delivering candidates configured to your organization's needs. When selecting a talent partner, you need to make sure they have expertise in your industry and can efficiently deliver the talent solutions that will solve your hiring challenges.
7. Offering Less Compensation
Ensuring fair pay doesn’t only mean money for the employees, but it is a proven strategy to improve employee retention, productivity, and engagement. Employees who discover that their pay is lower than their coworkers in the same position will likely look for a new job. Furthermore, candidates will reject your offer if they are offered less remuneration than the market rate, and you could possibly lose good employees.
To avoid this, you must analyze the job skills and the compensation provided to employees of that job position at other companies and within your own. Based on this and your evaluation of employee skills, you can decide on a fair and satisfactory wage rate for the applicant.
8. Neglecting an Overqualified Applicant
Passing over an overqualified person for a job is one of the typical mistakes made by HR managers. This is done because they don’t want the candidate to be overpowering in the position, and the candidate might feel bored or less valuable in such a low position and leave the organization quickly.
Regardless of this, candidates with extraordinary qualifications and skills can be beneficial for your team, department, and organization. They have the potential to push the team towards progress. To retain such talent, you can offer promotions, training and development opportunities, or other incentives.
9. Not Giving Diverse Candidates a Chance
Today’s workplace needs a diverse set of candidates who can come together to make an organization succeed in its mission. There are numerous benefits of diversity in the workplace. Diversity of age, background, gender, qualifications and skills, etc. can bring diversity to thoughts and ideas, thus bringing a new perspective to the organization. A diverse workforce can bring creativity and innovation to the table. It will also help other employees learn and grow.
In a Nutshell
Continuously analyzing and improving your hiring strategy will help you find deserving and qualified candidates that rightly fit your organization. Keeping the process simple and quick, yet efficient and avoiding these mistakes is what makes an organization succeed. It will also help you foster a delightful culture and progressive workforce.
About the Author: Pranjal Varma is a freelance content writer. With a bachelor’s degree in communication studies, He is passionate about reading, researching, and writing about team collaboration and management. When he is not researching, he is usually found trying out new team management tools.
