If you want to build a successful company, it at all times goes down to who you hire. We can compare a company organization to a puzzle because to every role, responsibility or operation, lies a person we call an employee – each of whom will dictate the company’s success. To solve or fill the puzzle, you need to hire the right people.
The process of hiring is complex and requires time and effort and you can’t afford to get the wrong candidate on board. According to the United States Department of Labor, it will cost you 30% of an employee’s annual package if you hire the wrong person.
To hire the right people you will need to avoid hiring mistakes and in this article, we will be discussing the importance of avoiding hiring mistakes alongside naming a few notable hiring mistakes that we have seen companies do.
Common Hiring Mistakes
i) Unclear hiring policies – Having unclear hiring policies can be a huge mistake when employing. Therefore, before you begin your employee search, you need to define your hiring policies. A clear hiring policy will prevent all illegal troubles. For example when it comes to exempt and nonexempt workers and or contract workers.
ii) Getting carried away by first impressions – We all know that confident eye contact, firm handshake among organized languages are the first impressions that would tell you whether you have the right person for your job. While they are important to note during your hiring process, an employer should not get carried away by them. They do not necessarily mean that the candidate is competent and is qualified for the job. Sometimes, the most confident candidates are the least qualified and the shy are the best qualified for the job.
iii) Being too narrow in your search – This is one of the most common hiring mistakes that employers make. You need to have a diversified slate of candidates varying in age, gender, race, background, and even experience in the field of work. With that, you will stand a big chance of landing the best candidate for your job positions.
iv) Failing to highlight culture – Failing to highlight your culture is another big mistake most companies make while hiring. Your company’s culture, values, and style are very important and they should be showcased as you search for new employees. The best candidates want to work for a company that has preserved their values and culture.
v) Posting jobs in the same old spots – This is a very common mistake among most recruiters. In desperation to find candidates, they post job ads everywhere or the same old spots. The same old spots are most likely to attract the same applicants again and again. Therefore, post job ads in the relevant places. An example is your own website. However, this works best if you have good traffic and your brand is well known.
vi) Avoiding feedback from candidates – Most recruiters tend to avoid candidate feedback more so of the rejected ones. Most believe that the feedback is useless and or negative but that’s not the case. Every feedback is critical and could improve your employment process based on the reviews received.
vii) Failure to attract the right candidates – For most companies, it is very important to attract the right candidates for the positions advertised. If you get few quality candidates it means your job ads do not give the right impressions and thus you do not attract the right candidates. Gender Decoder, Text Analyzer, and Textio are some of the tools you can use to increase the odds of attracting the best candidates.
viii) Lack of structured hiring process – If you are looking to hire someone, you require a kind of foresight. This basically means that as a hiring manager you should know what you need for your long term and that is why you need a well-organized structure for that process. Many hiring managers prioritize speed over quality under the pressure to get the vacancies filled as fast as possible. This is a hiring mistake that can be avoided. Instead, you can get the right structure and duties to hire the best candidate.
ix) Making the hiring process longer – Making the hiring process longer than necessary is a mistake. Research shows that hiring managers lose more than 14 hours in a week wanting to get the process done manually. Besides, when a hiring process takes longer than usual, the best candidates will disappear if they receive offers elsewhere that are able to move faster.
Actually, 60% of recruiters have admitted they lose applicants before they schedule an interview. To avoid this mistake, you can use recruiting software, many of which have emerged on the market. You will save time and fortune as the software is meant to automate different stages of the hiring process.
Importance of Avoiding Hiring Mistakes
i) Maximizing Productivity
Maximizing productivity should be the number one all-around importance of avoiding hiring mistakes. First, your time and the hiring team are very important. The hiring process will require you and your team to pull out of their daily responsibilities to get the process done.
By conducting a number of interviews in a week, you will not have enough time for your own organizational responsibilities. That said, a thorough and precise hiring process means you will get back to your responsibilities as soon as possible. On the other hand, if you are going to make mistakes when hiring, it means you are going to spend most of your time in the process trying to hire again and this has an effect on the company productivity.
In short, you want to avoid those hiring mistakes to maximize productivity.
ii) Minimize the Cost of the Hiring Process
Hiring is a very expensive process no doubt. As the employer, you will need hiring managers to conduct the process which means they are going to work out of their schedules to get the process done. Aside from that, they will also spend time and money on testing skills of the candidates, background checks, posting the jobs on boards among others.
If you are going to hire the wrong person, it means that you will have to repeat this process, and eventually, you will have it expensive. The importance of avoiding hiring mistakes here is that you will have a good hire, which means you will do another or second hire and in the end, minimize the cost of the process in general.
iii) Save Time
Saving time is one of the major importance of avoiding hiring mistakes. We all know time is money and if you are going to save the time you would have spent sitting on interviews or reviewing applications that increases your productivity elsewhere.
Additionally, you do not want to spend more of your time conducting hiring processes. You will get bored. Even at some point during the process, resumes might start to appear the same and candidates may feel interchangeable or all the same.
The boredom at this point may hinder you from recognizing the right candidates. To you, this might turn into a cycle. Because you were not able to avoid some hiring mistakes during the process, you will waste loads of time by finding yourself in the process again.
In general, you just want to save most of your time by hiring the top candidates in a precise hiring process.
v) You Will Land Good and Qualified Candidates
At the end of every hiring process, you usually have your qualified candidate but this also means that you have a number of applicants that you left out, some of who would have been a better candidate than the chosen one.
If you land the right person, the whole process was worth it but you will be frustrated if you come to learn that you let better candidates go for the wrong one. Well, you might still be having their contacts and it could be easy to reach them but in the competitive world we live in, some of the qualified candidates you let go of might have moved on, found new opportunities, and would not be excited to come back especially after rejecting them.
vi) You will Preserve Your Image as the Employer
Just like one thing leads to another, making mistakes when hiring can have an effect on your image as an employer. A bad hiring culture will always be talked about out there, whereby the candidates that have been at your company for interviews or even the existing employees. If most people are saying bad things about your company or your employees leave because they have been frustrated, your image as an employer could get tarnished.
Some of the employee frustrations begin from the time of the hiring process especially if you have a bad hiring culture. Even so, if you are going to announce the same vacancies every other time, it has an effect on your image as an employer. Therefore, if you avoid mistakes during hiring you will preserve and protect the image of your company.
vi) You will Avoid Training Employees Who Would Not Stick Around
The complete hiring process, from reviewing resumes to interviewing people is a huge hassle. In fact, employee onboarding is the most critical part. To onboard means, you are going to train them and acquaint them with company policies and processes as you help them integrate into your team.
This takes some time. You will agree that even the most adaptable and talented people will not just gel into the team but instead, they will get used to the team gradually. Based on how complex the position of your new employee is, it can take up to a year to reap their full productivity.
That said, if you are going to put in that effort as well as time to train someone who might not be part of your company, it is a big blow. It will mean you have to hire again, take them through the onboarding process for full productivity, something you can avoid. Therefore, the importance of avoiding hiring mistakes here is that you will train and onboard employees who will stick around.
vi) You Will Preserve the Company’s Confidential Information like Passwords
We are living in an advanced tech world, most companies have software, products, accounts, and websites where employees log in to get their tasks done. This kind of information is confidential and sharing it with employees who are going to stay with you for a long time is no big deal. These are like the keys to your kingdom.
That said, if you are going to give these details to an employee and show them a door a few years later, you will be compromising your data and cybersecurity. You may argue that it is possible for your IT team to close and remove access to the user’s software licenses, logins, or accounts.
However, do not forget that the employee gleaned some confidential information from your company at the time and that is something you can never take back. So, if you are going to hire the right person, you will ensure that just a few people get access to your systems, operations, and confidential data and information.
iv) Boost and Preserve Internal Team’s Work Morale
A good hire will have a direct impact on the company’s internal team, the same as a bad hire. Just like a good hire can add new experience, skills, and inspiration a bad hire can bring bad vibes and influence to the internal team whether through bad work ethics or bad personality. By making a good hire you will not have to worry about the impact of the employee on the internal employees.
Final Words
In general, the hiring process is difficult. It requires your time and money. Some candidates are even willing to cheat or lie just to get the job. So, any recruiters especially after reading this article will understand how important it is to avoid hiring mistakes. Fortunately, HirePoint is a tool that can help you during this process. You will be able to uncover candidates’ psychological traits and predict their future job performance and therefore you will be able to understand if your candidate(s) would be a good fit for a certain job position or not.
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HirepointAdmin