5 Of the Most Common Recruitment Mistakes 

Recruiting the right people is essential for any business, large or small. It can be a challenging process, however, as there are many things to consider when making hiring decisions. Unfortunately, mistakes during the recruitment process can lead to costly and time-consuming problems later on. To help ensure you make the best possible hires, here are five of the most common recruitment mistakes to avoid.

Number 1 – Rushed Hiring 

A rushed recruitment process is a common hiring issue within businesses. It is so common in fact, that many businesses don’t realise this is a mistake, but rather consider this a part of their regular recruitment process. Instead of taking the required time to properly attract a skilled and diverse talent pool, and carry out relevant background checks and thorough interviews, many businesses are reactive to most – if not all – of these recruitment stages to get a new hire in as quickly as possible.

There are several reasons why businesses tend to do this with some of the most common being; the sudden resignation of an employee, needing to rapidly expand, or looking to fill a skill gap in the current workforce and frequently, a lack of process or ownership to support a proactive approach to recruitment.

Number 2 – Poor Job Adverts and Job Descriptions

Job adverts and descriptions are snippets of content placed on job sites, or other platforms through which talent can apply for an open role. Through this piece of content, job seekers will gain information about the skills and responsibilities required for a role, alongside things like salary, annual leave, and any additional benefits.

Where many recruiters go wrong is in the quality and relevance of information present in the job advert and job description. It’s fairly common for poorly written job descriptions to lack the key information that applicants require to discern whether they’re a suitable fit for the role. Naturally, this leads to the wrong types of people applying for the role and the talent you want to attract discounting the role because it's not deemed relevant or engaging. It is worth noting that a few Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have tools to help you create inclusive and engaging recruitment content to craft the best job descriptions and email communications.

Eploy's ATS includes an 'Ad Tuner' to highlight content for optimisation and provides potential alternatives to consider. It looks at reading ease, sentence length, gender bias and question balance to check content against key engagement criteria. You can find out a bit more about the ATS features and request a personalised demo here.
 

Number 3 – Sitting on CVs/Not Keeping Applicants in The Loop 

The natural assumption is that if you haven’t heard back from a business several weeks after submitting a job application, you’ve been unsuccessful. In fact, several weeks might be pushing it as in a candidate driven market there is a greater expectation from candidates. In an industry where top talent is highly sought after, qualified candidates are quick to move on and are likely to be applying for several different roles at one time; combine this with a frequent need to land a new job quickly, many businesses that drag their feet in the recruitment process tend to miss out on the best candidates.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a tool that can be massively beneficial in keeping talent engaged and updated on their status in the recruitment funnel. At Eploy, we encourage in-house recruitment teams of all sizes to incorporate an ATS within their recruitment practices to help them attract, engage, recruit and onboard talent quickly and efficiently.

Number 4 – Not Training Hiring Managers on Unconscious Bias

Whether we’re aware of it or not, everyone has their own inherent biases that play a role in how we interact with those around us. With the multitude of benefits that a diverse workforce can provide in terms of productivity, decision-making, and cultural enrichment, hiring managers with unconscious biases that haven’t been picked up on can unintendedly be hindering the quality of a business’ new hires.

Inclusivity training that helps those involved in the recruitment process pick up on any unconscious biases they may have is a great way to grow the diversity of the workforce and reap the benefits that this will have within the business. Additionally, recruitment tools such as an ATS should offer features to support an inclusive recruitment process such as name-blind recruitment whereby candidate information (name, gender, ethnicity, etc.) is removed from applications during candidate assessment. There is gender bias checking of adverts (mentioned in number 2) to address unconscious bias and it pays to ensure your recruitment reporting tracks equal opportunities information. 

Number 5 – Waiting for The Perfect Candidate

When hiring for a role, the recruitment team or hiring manager is almost certainly going to have an idea of the perfect candidate. The search for this perfect candidate is something many businesses spend a great number of resources and time on which, unfortunately, tends to end up being wasted since the perfect candidate rarely ever actually exists. As an alternative, a business should look to hire candidates who possess the required skills for the role or has the potential to develop those skills as well as a positive attitude that enables them to be trained to best meet the requirements of the job.

Contact Eploy for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) 

At Eploy, we offer highly configurable Applicant Tracking Systems designed to help you find the best candidates for every job opening. Get in touch with our specialist team at Eploy to find out how we can help you meet your recruitment goals.