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As any recruiter will tell you, hiring the right candidate is tough. A myriad of factors can impact a successful hire, and oftentimes it comes down to a combination of a good job hiring process, a solid cultural fit and being in the right place at the right time.
While it’s impossible to predict a good hire with 100% accuracy, there are some crucial hiring practices to avoid if you want to land the best candidate possible for the role.
Here are 6 common hiring mistakes made by businesses — and hiring tips, advice and best practice to help you avoid them.
Even if the successful candidate is reporting directly to you, that doesn’t mean you should make the hiring decision entirely on your own. Another opinion is always beneficial, especially if you’ve been involved in the process from the get-go.
Other members of your team may be able to offer valuable insights into the skills and experience the right hire needs to have in order to succeed. In addition, if the hire is going to be working closely with other team members, you want to make sure everyone gels together before making the final call.
Assemble a select group of team members and have them meet with short-listed candidates. Provide your team with the job description and ask them for clear feedback at the end of the interview. However, be sure to communicate exactly how much influence your team members will have on the hiring decision. This way, you’ll be able to manage expectations.
Interviews are stressful and nerves can get the better of us. While some candidates thrive under interview pressure, others may struggle. Your role as an interviewer is to make your interviewee feel at ease, so you can get a strong sense of who they truly are and how they would fit in to your organisation.
It’s easy to get swept away in a candidate who interviews confidently and conclude from that experience alone that they’re the best for the role. However, in doing so you may overlook someone who would be a great fit but didn’t interview as well. Remember: you’re hiring the best candidate for the role, not the candidate who is best at interviewing.
If you have a potential hire that seems like a good fit but failed to impress in the interview, it may be worth taking a different approach. Ask them to come into the office for a trial day or invite them to come around and meet the team in an informal setting. This provides you with another scenario to help gauge their suitability for the role.
Finding a candidate that matches your skill and experience expectations perfectly is like finding a needle in a haystack. You might find a candidate that has a wealth of experience and unique skills but they don’t quite align with the role you’re hiring for. Letting them slip through your fingers is one of the biggest recruitment mistakes. Your company loses out on great talent — and on top of that, they may move on to use their valuable skills and experience in a competing organisation.
Rather than chalking it down to a case of bad timing, try to reimagine how they could fit into your team. Are they suited to another vacant position, or could you shuffle around some existing responsibilities within the job description to another member of the team? Is there any training or upskilling you can offer to help fill any skill gaps? By being flexible with the role, you’ll have a great new hire and they’ll also feel like a valued member of your team.
We’re programmed to connect instantly with people we feel are similar to us. That’s why one of the biggest hiring issues is this desire to hire someone who’s on the same wavelength as you. However, having a team of individuals who are all the same can be counterproductive to innovation and problem-solving.
Hiring for diversity in the workplace is extremely valuable. These team members can challenge your existing team’s thinking, provide alternative solutions, and bring fresh approaches to issues.
Diversity is essential to any thriving team. Actively seek out interviews with candidates who are different to you – whether it’s in life experience, career history, age or education.
When you’re interviewing a candidate, you only have a limited window to make an assessment on their suitability for the role. If you blaze into the interview without a clear list of questions you want to ask — or worse yet, you haven’t read their resume — you risk making the wrong hiring decision because you didn’t have the right information on hand.
Work with your HR team or recruiter to ensure you’re covering all your bases in the interview, from technical skills to questions that gauge how well the candidate’s values and beliefs align with your company’s mission and vision. Consider setting aside at least 15 minutes on the morning of the interview to properly review the candidate’s resume and list important questions you need to ask.
Finding the right candidate takes time but sometimes you don’t have that luxury. In these cases, it’s tempting to settle for a candidate who doesn’t have all the skills you need or cultural fit with the team. While this may meet your needs in the short term, in the long run, the wrong hire could cost your team in terms of lower morale and disruptions to productivity.
Investigate opportunities for a short-term contractor or a freelancer to fill the role in the interim. This way, you’ll have extra hands on deck to fill urgent needs, and you can continue the search without the imminent time pressure.
If you have specific hiring needs, get in touch with one of our specialist recruitment consultants today.
