4 Common Recruiting Mistakes and Tips to Solve Them

Here are some of the common recruitment mistakes that are often committed out in any industry, along with some approaches to fix them. If you’re experiencing a turbulence in your recruitment operations – or you just want to be informed for when you hire your own people, then keep reading.

1. Canning rejected candidates.

One huge and common mistake is discarding candidates who are qualified, interested, but not good at this particular time. Some rejected candidates, although they may not have been the right fit at the time, have really great potential – they just happened to apply in a wrong position at a wrong time. They have already expressed interest in working with your company and depending on their skills, they may be a great fit for another position.

Recruitment tip: Ask these qualified but rejected candidates to stay in touch for future opportunities. Create a list manually or add them into talent pools where you can reach out and engage them easily.

2. Relying on standardized hiring processes.

Sometimes your team must deal with high volume of job requisitions and that is where standardized hiring processes come into play. It will guide and bring them in the right direction when it comes to creating a good candidate experience.

However, you must remember that people and companies change, and so do roles. You can’t keep relying on fixed, standardized hiring processes because at some point, they will become more of hindrance than a help.

Recruitment tip:  Meet with your recruitment stakeholders regularly to determine which standardized processes work and which ones don’t. Your focus should be hiring the right talent. These processes exist for a reason, but don’t let them make your job harder than it needs to be.

3. Forgetting and avoiding candidate feedback.

One of the common recruitment mistakes is to believe that feedbacks will always be either negative or useless only. Although it is hard to reject candidates and even harder to get a feedback from them after, candidate feedbacks have great potential in taking your hiring process to the next level.

Recruitment tip: Incorporating a candidate experience survey in your recruitment process is one way. There are many online and external services available to gather responses. Focus on gathering information about satisfaction, experiences, and interview feedback from your candidates, both hired and not.

4. Doing freestyle interviews.

One of the best ways to get to know candidates is to do “freestyle” interviews – and surprisingly, many people prefer it too as no one would want to be talking to someone who sounds like a robot. Unstructured interviews aren’t necessarily bad. However, the consequences of it such as unconscious bias can lead to some pretty serious recruitment mistakes.

Recruitment tip: For a better selection process, you can allow a certain amount of flexibility within the interview if you can ensure that certain questions are answered accordingly. Make sure to create templates accessible within your talent acquisition team.