Hiring the right employee to add to your team is crucial to the growth and success of your business. Employees can help you achieve your business goals and contribute to building a great culture. In the face of tough competition, it is more important for companies to hire the right employees. According to a report by the Society for Human Resource Management, 68% of HR professionals are struggling with finding the right employee for full-time positions in their organization. In addition, 49% of the respondents cited competition from other employers as one of the reasons they cannot find the right employee.
On the other hand, hiring the wrong employee can be detrimental to your business. According to a CareerBuilder survey conducted by Harris Poll, companies lost an average of $14,900 on every bad hire and nearly three in four employers say they hired the wrong person for a position. In addition, the US Department of Labor revealed that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
Surely you would want to hire the best applicant to join your team. But staffing and recruiting go beyond scanning CVs and resumes and conducting interviews. The process of hiring the right employee can become a stressful experience for the hiring individual. Recruitment mistakes can happen but being aware can improve your chances of a successful hire. Check out these common mistakes and boost your hiring process.
- Creating a Hasty Job Description
- Lacking A Structured Hiring Process
- Over-Reliance on CVs or Referrals
- Hiring Based on Interview
- Rushing The Interview Process
- Hiring For Fit
- Not Considering Internal Employees
- Overselling The Role
- Hiring Based on Gut Feel
- Thinking Short Term
1. Creating A Hasty Job Description
One of the biggest mistakes recruiters make is creating a vague job description. Finding the right candidate starts with knowing what you want. Your search starts with providing a clear view of the job, tasks, and expectations. Being accurate with your job description will help you stay focused on the ideal candidate, skills, and qualifications you need.
In order to get the best candidate, you need to create a clear and complete job description. Does the open position require technical or soft skills? What personality traits are needed for the role? Not having a clear job description could only mean a waste of time for both you and the candidate. More importantly, avoid copy-paste when creating a job description. The company culture of a business may not be exactly the same as yours.
A job description that is too short or vague may result in an avalanche of candidates that are not qualified for the position you are trying to fill. They need not be lengthy and detailed but should be concise and interesting to attract the right candidate. Moreover, it should be exciting, fresh, and brief. If possible, you should work with your marketing team when creating the job description. After all, you are selling your company to the applicant.
2. Lacking A Structured Hiring Process
Recruitment done haphazardly can seriously hamper the results of the hiring process. Every step of the process is important in attracting applicants and finding the right hire for the position. There may be a lot of aspirants for the open role in your company but one tiny mistake in the interview and selection process could result in hiring the wrong candidate.
Staffing and recruiting require foresight on your part. Most businesses are more concerned with hiring quickly instead of well. For this reason, they tend to skip important steps in the process like conducting background checks, conducting several interviews, and probing deeply into their qualifications. A structured hiring process is much easier to implement, analyze, and improve.
When hiring a candidate, you don’t want the process to be too long because you might lose the most qualified applicant. Studies reveal that 60% of recruiters admit losing candidates before they are scheduled for an interview. Identify what slows down the process and then find out how you can speed up the process.
3. Over-Reliance on CVs and Referees
Some companies rely heavily on the CV or resume of the candidate. They spend hours analyzing and comparing details. The truth of the matter is that CVs are not accurate in predicting the suitability of a candidate for the role you are hiring for. It is easy to make up details and there is no way to verify claims.
Use the CVs only when shortlisting applicants. Are they consistent and aligned with your needs? Check for quality formatting or grammar and spelling. If the candidate has a LinkedIn or other social media profiles, compare the CV. If the achievements indicated look dubious, flag them for future verification.
If the applicant was referred by an employee, use them to supplement collected information during the interview and selection process. Referees will usually paint their recommendations in a favorable light. Ask them for strengths and development needs to help you assess the applicant better.
4. Hiring Based on Interview
The interview stage of hiring provides the opportunity to meet candidates, get to know their skills, abilities, and personalities. In addition, the interview is your chance to hone in on the background, insight, and motivation of the applicant. Don’t make the mistake of being swept away by a good interview as it can have a halo effect.
The Halo effect causes interviewers to judge someone based on one or two traits. Physical attractiveness is more likely to be perceived by the interviewer as kindness, being sociable, and smart even if it is not related to their personality. When you hire a person based on the interview, you tend to disregard their actual skill or experience. It can be easy to overlook red flags if you are already blown away during the interview.
Make sure to get as much information as you need about the candidate. Get to know them deeper, how they deal with pressure, or how they communicate with teammates and other co-workers. By doing so, you will gain an in-depth knowledge of the person and determine whether they are the candidate you are looking for.
5. Rushing The Interview Process
Unless there is an urgent need to fill up a position now, it is best not to rush the hiring process. Research about the candidates, prepare the best interview questions, and carefully evaluate each candidate. Take the time to do a background check. By rushing the interview process, you tend to ignore possible red flags such as typographical and grammatical errors on their resumes, arriving late for the interview, arrogance and overconfidence, and others.
To help you weed out the mediocre from the talented applicants, take your time asking questions. If necessary, improve your interview questions. Test their technical knowledge and cultural fit. Avoid generic questions that the candidate may have already practiced answers for. While filling a vacant position is important, you should never rush the process so that you can find the right fit.
An urgent and immediate staffing requirement may cause you to cut corners in a lot of ways. Emergency hiring may be needed but rushing the process may force you to hire a candidate that is only good for now instead of for the long run.
6. Hiring For Fit
Fit is a broad term that could have different meanings in the recruitment process. It could mean age, gender, or personality. It could also refer to how you feel about the applicant during the interview. Whatever the meaning is, it is likely that you are missing out on a great candidate just because you deemed that they are not fit for the job.
Sometimes there is a tendency for companies to overlook an applicant even if they are the most qualified one just because they have some bias. Additionally, they look for the perfect fit instead of a candidate with the aptitude for growth. You might be surprised to know that these persons you overlook are most likely better than the “perfect” candidate you are looking for.
Having some underlying bias against the candidates can prevent you from looking at them objectively. The more you have this kind of approach, the more difficult it will be for you to find the right candidate.
7. Not Considering Internal Employees
Most organizations tend to look at external candidates to fill up job vacancies without realizing that there could be internal employees who are more qualified for the open role in your organization. You may not know it but the right person for the job may be within your organization so you don’t have to look outside.
Many organizations tend to assume that the best candidates are those who are not working within. They tend to overlook internal employees in order to cast a wider net in the job market.
Internal employees have already invested time and energy in your organization. They already understand your company culture and are likely to easily get up to speed in the new role faster than a new hire.
Giving your existing employees a new role can also help boost their morale and promote team spirit. In addition, it demonstrates that your company offers career growth and development. Moreover, training your current employees for a new role helps in retaining any intellectual capital that you might lose due to employee churn.
8. Overselling The Role
In order to attract the best talent to join your organization, we are sometimes tempted to aggrandise the position or promise more opportunities than there actually are. Making empty promises to an applicant may result in their loss of focus or motivation causing them to look for work elsewhere where they would get the promised benefits they couldn’t get from your company.
At the interview, set expectations right away. Eventually, the new hire will find out whether the role would be more limited or demanding than they were expecting. In addition, they will easily know when the promised advances or bonuses were exaggerated. Just as you are looking for an accurate assessment of your potential employees, they are expecting the same transparency from your end. According to the State of American Place report, only 60% of employees are aware of what is expected from them.
Overselling a role could hurt your credibility. Once it disappears, it could be hard to bring it back. It could also contribute to your company’s churn rate. In fact, 20% of employee turnover occurs in the first 45 days of employment. Full disclosure is the best policy.
9. Hiring Based on Gut Feeling
During the interview stage, recruiters usually gain an idea of which candidates they prefer. More often than not, gut feeling can lead to bad hiring decisions. They are based on unconscious biases and social preferences. Hiring based on gut feeling keeps you from looking at the candidates objectively.
With gut feelings, you could end up narrowing down the candidates to those who share your background, ethnicity, age, gender. This is called “like me” bias. The sad fact is that 60% of recruiters may have already made a decision about the suitability of a candidate within 15 minutes of meeting them or even before the interview. The danger here is that the candidate you did not hire may turn out to be greater than the one you hired based on your bias.
So how do you avoid hiring biases? One of the best ways is to hire a candidate based on evidence instead of subjective assumptions. Evaluate applicants based on their skills, characteristics, and other required criteria. Biases aside, you will be able to match skill sets with the candidate’s job profile and find the best-suited candidate.
10. Thinking Short Term
The reason why you are recruiting is to fill up an immediate gap in the team but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking long-term. Surely, you would want the new hire to develop and grow with your company. Hiring short-term employees will cost your business time and money.
When you hire, you do so because the role is needed for the long term. You don’t hire for just a few months but because the position is part of your company’s long-term plan for the next five years or more.
Hiring a new employee requires thinking ahead and understanding how the candidate will fit into the general plan of the company for the future. Not doing so can have a huge impact on the motivation and productivity of the new hire.
Avoiding these staffing & recruiting mistakes will contribute to finding the right candidate to add to your growing team. These tips will help ensure that you won’t commit these flaws and guarantee that the right employee will be hired.
Why Outsource Recruitment To airisX?
Recruiting new employees for your team is a notoriously time-consuming process. Outsourcing recruitment to a provider like airisX allows you to remove yourself from the tediousness of having to go through hundreds of resumes and bad interviews to find the right candidate that meets the criteria of the employee you are looking for, allowing you to focus on what matters in the recruiting process – doing the final interview for the right candidate, and making the final hiring decision.