8 recruitment sins and how to avoid them
In this article, you will read about eight worst recruitment sins that you may commit and tips on how to avoid them.
As an employer, you are interested in finding reliable and knowledgeable workers who will not fail you. Very often this leads to a long and complicated recruitment process that wrings out both you and your potential employee. Such a trend is, unfortunately, very common these days. In the end, your potential employee may decide that he or she doesn’t need the offered position that much because of the recruitment and its failures. Your goal, as an employer, is to make recruitment effective for you and interesting for your potential workers. In this article, you will read about eight worst recruitment sins that you may commit and tips on how to avoid them.
8 recruitment sins
Your job description does not correspond to what tasks the job will actually require.
You don’t provide any answer to the potential worker’s application. They don’t even understand if you received their CVs. (Keep in mind that someone might have worked with professional resume writers to apply for your position.)
No contact information is provided: neither phone number nor a contact e-mail of the recruiter is offered to the applicant.
The interview lasts more than 2 hours and takes several sessions with different people.
The questions asked are too broad and are hard to relate to the desired position.
The recruiter is not prepared for the interview and acts indifferent towards the applicant.
There is no time for the applicants to ask their questions.
The applicant receives no feedback after the whole recruitment process.
How to avoid these sins?
You value your personal time and always want to find the best candidate in the shortest time possible. But you or your recruiter get paid for conducting the interviews, while your applicants don’t. This means that you do need to show your potential workers that you value their time and ensure that the recruitment process will be a beneficial experience for both sides. Here are several tips on how to avoid committing the sins described above and how to turn each of them into benefactions.
1. Carefully think of what your applicants will be doing, what skills are essential for the position, and what skills are desired. Then write line by line these skills, and ensure that your recruiter creates the job offer according to the notes. Before you post the offer, review it again.
And don’t forget, that there are many position-related skills that a person can learn over the training of a month or a couple of them. So don’t require your applicants to have all of them from the beginning.
2. Recruiters must always answer applicants on receiving their application. Make sure that it’s not an auto-generated message, but a real personalized answer to a potential employee.
3. This is an addition to the previous point. In the letter with the approval of the application, you need to include contact information for emergencies. And the letter must be sent from a personal email of your recruiter, not from a “no-reply” account.
4-5. Very attentively consider what questions you want to ask your applicants and what skills you need to check. Don’t ask people about re-typing text in Microsoft Office if they will be working with Photoshop. You remember the list you made for the recruiter in point one, right? Go point by point and check particular essential skills, not the whole background of the potential worker.
And don’t ask questions like “where do you see yourself in five years?” or “what do you want to achieve in your life?” These questions always puzzle your applicants, make them nervous, and in fact provide no useful information about them as potential employees.
6. This is a must-do! You recruitment team must be interested in finding great applicants! They have to be interested in each and every potential worker they conduct interviews with. And they have to be prepared in terms of questions to ask and questions to answer.
7. All applicants always have some inquiries and questions that they want to ask. Be open to these questions and try to answer them to the fullest extent possible.
8. Regardless of the interview outcome (whether you hire an applicant or not), give feedback. If someone doesn’t get the position, try to explain what this person is missing to clarify (and even justify) your decision.
Besides the tips above, there are several additional tricks on how to make your recruitment process more pleasant for the applicants and more useful to your company.
Post job offers on your website with detailed description and salary information (whenever possible).
Wherever you can put contact information, do it. This gives potential employees an opportunity to contact you in the way that suits them most.
Try giving feedback on the received CVs within 1-3 working days, a week tops.
If you have several stages of recruitment, clarify it in the job offer and repeat this fact during any contact with applicants.
After the recruitment process is finished and you have made a decision, give detailed feedback. Try doing it within a week not to keep your applicants waiting.
Always be open to any additional questions that potential employees may have.
The bottom line
All the above-mentioned steps can be summed up in a single idea: care for your candidate’s experience. Treat your potential workers in a way you want them to treat you and your company to reach mutual understanding and satisfaction.
