Recruiting talent is not easy, especially meeting skilled talent demand across industries accompanied by looming global labour shortage. In order to attract the best talent with the right set of skills, recruiters are required to ardently search for a gem among the pebbles, rocks and stones.
The process to include posting job ads, screening applicants’ resumes, inviting candidates for tests, to preparing for the interviews, recruitment process is a full-time job that should be executed prudently. However, no matter how attentive recruiters are during the candidate screening and hiring processes, there are still chances of making a few common errors along the way.
The truth as the old adage goes ‘to err is human’. Recruiters are humans working hard as machines, and humans do make mistakes. At some point time or another, recruiters might miss out on minute details during the hiring process. Yet, these seemingly ‘small’ blunders are the ones that could cost a recruiter leading to ofpotentially bigger loss.
When recruiters are unable to identify and address clumsy mistakes, they might lose valuable candidates for trivial reasons that could have been possibly prevented. Besides which, recruiters might even end up making even more costly mistakes such as attracting bad hires to the business.
When it comes to recruiting faux pas, below are some of the most common mistakes every recruiter makes:
1. Trusting the resume (too much)
Resumes are not everything. Do not be easily fooled by a piece of paper that seems all good, about your candidate’s quality. While an attractive resume helps leave positive impression, you should always cross-check on the detailed experiences, to find out for yourself and greater business good if everything stated, is in accordance with those on paper.
Before making a hiring decision, you should conduct careful background screening and assessments to check with references and make sure the potential new hires are not lying or faking experiences and come from a credible background.
2. Seeming too overconfident about your recruiting skills
Being complacent might be one of the biggest mistakes by recruiters, even the most experienced ones. When someone believes that they know everything, they tend to take reckless and impulsive decisions without proper consideration about everything.
You might have spent years of your life, asking candidates the same interview questions and even able to predict what their answers will be. However, being too overconfident about your scanning and reviewing capabilities to predict an interview’s outcome beforehand can cost you losing out on prospective candidates, if you ignore the subtle details.
3. Writing unclear job description
If you are unable to write a solid and clear job description about candidate requirements in your job ad, then chances are, you will waste lot of time sorting through hundreds of random resumes that do not match with skills and job expectations.
Worse of it all, unappealing job ads might turn away the best talents from proceeding with the application process. Therefore, it is imperative to get down to specifics in a detailed job description specifying accurate requirements to attract the right set of candidates to your business.
4. Waiting for ‘the perfect’ candidate
There is no such thing as a ‘the perfect candidate’, however there is ‘best talent” available if you look around. While you should not hire just anyone to fill a vacant position, you should not waste time either, waiting for ‘the perfect candidate”.
Get in touch with the interviewed candidates and communicate about the ongoing recruitment next steps. If you see potential new hires in them, do not hold up for way too long and procrastinate hiring decisions for the time you waste on careful rethink, they could be fetched by other organisations.
5. Overlooking passive candidates
Your future top performers are out there. The problem is, they are not even actively looking for job opportunities. If you only focus on the resumes piling up on your desk, you might miss out on the best talents. Talent acquisition is the new buzzword in today’s specialised competitive recruitment industry, and it is time you join the game as well.
Be proactive in your approaches and use networking platforms to reach out to talented individuals who might be trapped in their old jobs. Notify them about current job openings and invite them to apply.
Remember that nobody and nothing perfect, neither they should be. The first step is to fix these mistakes is by admitting, that you might have done one. Only when recruiters acknowledge and concede that they have done wrong, repair and correction can be thoroughly made.
Some of the mistakes can be very easily fixed, while some others might sticks as a black spot in your career so better be careful. Therefore, a faux pas irrespective of the magnitude of its impact is important for recruiters to always pay good attention, fix the most common mistakes, and learn from them. And if you haven’t done any of these common mistakes yet, try avoiding them as much as possible, and you will drive a top-notch hiring process in the long run.
Next read: Redefining the Role of a Recruiter in the Digital Era
