Whether you’re looking for new employees for the first time or have recruited for years, common recruiting mistakes can happen.
In the changing recruiting industry, it is crucial to stay up to date with things like cutting-edge technology.
Conversely, as recruiting trends change, so should the strategies that you use to recruit.
In other words, strategies that were once successful may no longer find the candidates you need. You might even end up dealing with the cost of a bad hire when candidates don’t work out.
We’ve compiled some common recruiting mistakes below for you to consider when looking for new ways to improve recruiting efforts.
5 Common Recruiting Mistakes to Avoid With Candidates
1. Finding Great Talent—And Forgetting Them
So you’ve found a candidate that could potentially be a match. You send them a LinkedIn InMail and continue to source candidates.
What happens if that candidate doesn’t respond to your InMail? Do you have a CRM in place that keeps track of all the candidates you’ve reached out to?
Without tracking, ensuring communication with candidates is consistent can be a challenge.
If you don’t have tracking in place, consider nurturing your candidates with a candidate relationship management system, or another multi-channel system that automates the engagement with the candidate and keeps track of your activity.
If more than half the battle is finding the right candidate, you sure don’t want to forget that you found them.
2. Losing Track of Your Hiring Process
Tracking your candidate throughout the recruitment process is crucial. You should be monitoring the source of your candidates and the communication record between you and the candidate.
Tracking will make your life much easier (especially on Mondays). Anyone, including yourself, can go into an online file where the tracking takes place and get a complete picture of how things are going.
Avoid this common recruiting mistake by beginning to document the items you want to track – at the very least, the communication record – so that you and your team can look back (or forward) and fill roles.
3. Only Recruiting When You Have To
Considering how long a search can take, there are plenty of benefits to consistently recruiting.
Nevertheless, many companies may not see the need for recruiting efforts if they have enough prospective candidates.
The simple truth is that the best candidates aren’t looking for jobs. You’ll need to show these passive candidates what your company is all about by taking a few proactive measures.
When you’re not recruiting, consider putting energy into a social media presence.
By building up a social media community, you’ll already have a network that you can look to when you need to fill a new role.
If social media isn’t an option, you can always try other options to see what works best. One method is building out an email marketing campaign that engages candidates with new content.
In the end, a candidate is more likely to engage a future opportunity with you when you’ve reached out to them in the past.
4. Neglecting Your Employer Brand
Your employer brand can be communicated and maintained in a variety of ways.
One method to look at is through your website. Essentially, your career website is one piece of low hanging fruit that can easily illustrate what it’s like to work at your company.
Keeping social media pages active is another excellent way to showcase your employer brand.
Plus, once you have your social media in place, you can enlist the help of fellow employees with their testimonials.
By using employee testimonials, you boost your employer brand and give current employees a great platform to share their voice.
5. Ignoring Employee Insight When Recruiting
Do you look for insight from your team—who will be directly influenced by the new hire—when undertaking a search process?
If you find yourself struggling to write a job description, help isn’t too far away. It can be beneficial to check in with your team to know what company expectations a candidate must meet.
Additionally, getting insight from your management team can help you refine the search and get management invested in the process.
Thus, you have a variety of perspectives to consider when looking at potential candidates to hire. This can help catch a bad hire before you even extend an offer.
TruPath is an executive search firm that finds mid to senior-level executives in mission-critical roles at your organization. Contact us if you’re looking for a leader to join your team.
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