4 Hiring Mistakes Managers Make, That You Should Avoid

You’re looking to hire the perfect candidate, but something keeps going wrong? Hiring Managers can sometimes make unforced hiring mistakes in their processes that waste your business’s time, resources and money. As recruiters with many years of experience, and solid relationships with our candidates and clients, we now know a thing or two about what not to do!

Here are 4 hiring mistakes, and how to avoid them:

• Slow-moving process
• Not selling the company
• Lowballing candidates
• Bad interview experiences

1. Slow Moving Process

If you have a slow-moving recruitment process and are failing to move quickly on your hiring decisions, you will probably lose out on talent.

The competition and race for the best talent is on, and you need a sharp and quick recruitment prcoess to put yourself ahead of the game.

There are many negatives to prolonging your recruitment process:

Failing to secure key skills and talent

Candidates with niche skills are in high demand. However, with the competition, in half the time your recruitment process takes, they will have been snapped up by someone else.

Loss of productivity

More stress and pressure of having to stretch across additional work can lead to burnout and reduced output.

Damage to brand

One person who has a negative experience will tell ten others. Candidates will look at your hiring process to gauge what it is like to work with you. If a candidate goes elsewhere due to a sluggish hiring process, they might share the experience, hitting your brand and making you less attractive to future candidates.

How do you know if your process is too slow?

• When you get back to your candidate in 2-4 weeks, you find out they have taken another offer.
• Your open positions stay open for weeks or for months
• You’re making your top candidates go through more than 2 interviews and or longwinded tests.
• You’re experiencing a higher turnover than usual. You cannot hire the top talent and end up hiring those who don’t have the skills or have a poor cultural fit.

How can you speed it up?

You don’t have to sacrifice the quality of hire to speed up your hiring process

Use hard data to make improvements to the process

Create a process map of the hiring journey and record the average time it takes for a candidate to move from one stage to another. Then compare these times to industry averages and immediately see where the bottlenecks are.

Set hard selection dates

Set a firm data where you need to have decided whether to progress a candidate. Get a checklist of job requirements to avoid distractions and make quick, evidence-based decisions.

Balance time and assessments

How many assessments do you need to get the information necessary? On the other hand, there is a danger of implying a lack of trust in your candidates’ abilities. So, try to strike a balance that works.

2. Not Selling The Company

Candidates are not just interested in the job on offer and its salary. Instead, they are looking for a role that will reflect their values and will satisfy them.

There are also additional factors:

• Benefits package
• Systems and technology on offer
• Flexible working
• Social aspects
• Work-life balance

Proactive:

Rather than waiting to be asked, set aside a section in the interview to talk about the company. Be proactive and talk about how the company is developing and its culture; put it in context.

USP:

Try to explain your company’s unique selling point and differentiate yourselves from your competitors.

Sell, Sell, Sell

Does your organisation have a great perk or benefit? If so, mention it.

You can discuss social activities and aspects of your company’s culture. This helps paint an image of a company where you can enjoy your career.

Don’t just recite the companies ‘about’ website page. Instead, bring the company alive by sharing experiences with the candidate.

You could take about what you personally enjoy about the company or how you have progressed. This is very useful to a candidate and helps sell the company.

3. Lowballing Candidates

It can be a difficult conversation to have with candidates when discussing salary expectations, but you should be. As open as you can be about what you can offer.

What is lowballing?

Lowballing means making the candidate an offer lowing to what was discussed, hoping they have already committed to the job and will accept it regardless.

If you have taken a candidate through all the interview stages to make them a disappointing offer, there’s no doubt the candidate will be insulted.

Why is lowballing bad?

If the candidate is insulted by a disappointing offer, they are likely to pull out of the process, accept a counteroffer, or even remain in their current position.

When a candidate is upfront about their salary expectations, and you go forward with an interview, you are under a mutual agreement that you have accepted their requirements.

Trust

If you lowball the candidate, it becomes a breach of trust, and the candidate will feel deceived.

First Impressions

Even if the candidate declines and you bump up the offer, first impressions are hard to shake off. That candidate will always feel like you undervalued them or deceived them.

Value

If you really value your organisation and want employees who produce results, you should compensate them for their worth.

4. Bad Interview Experience

Aside from just selling the company, you represent your company, so you need to give a good impression.

Be prepared so you can make the best use of the time available.

Schedule enough time. It is harder to communicate if you are doing video interviews. Therefore, you cannot cover the same amount in 1 hour.

Show that you are interested in them and have fully read their CV. If candidates have researched your company, you should do the same.

Showing up late is a big no. Interviews need to understand that candidates take time out of their working hours to appear for interviews.

Put your camera on when interviewing candidates over video and give them your full attention.

Here is more advice on video interviews