6 Recruitment Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

If you want to place key positions faster, you need to avoid this six common recruitment mistakes. Here’s how to do it.

Recruiting is not merely a function of HR, it’s essential to the success of your organization. Without a well-defined strategy for recruiting talent, you run the risk of making inefficient and costly hiring decisions—up to $17,000 in lost productivity, compromised work quality, and turnover.

To ensure better hires, you need a targeted recruiting strategy that will help identify high-quality candidates who align with the requirements of the position and the corporate culture. Avoiding these six recruitment mistakes can help streamline your hiring process so you can make more reliable hiring decisions that will elevate and enhance company performance.

1. Hiring in desperation mode

When you’re desperate, you can often make hasty decisions that can have long-term (often negative) consequences for your organization. This is as true in hiring as anywhere else.

That’s why it’s essential to approach the recruitment process proactively, not reactively. Building and maintaining a pipeline of potential candidates, even when you’re not actively hiring, ensures that you always have a pool of pre-vetted, talented individuals to choose from.

This will reduce time pressure and help improve the quality of your hires.

Here are some steps you can take to build a talent pipeline:

2. Failing to validate traits

Resumés can be misleading. Everyone naturally puts their best foot forward and, as a result, often overstates their previous experience and success. In fact, Forbes published a startling report last year, claiming that 70% of workers lie on their resumés.

As a result, validating each candidate’s values, aptitudes, passion, behaviors, and skills is absolutely critical. You can do this through a series of screening activities, including tailored assessments, reference checking, and more.

The more you validate candidates early in the hiring process, the less turnover you’ll have.

3. Not tapping into your personal network

Referral hires are 40% more likely to remain with an employer after the first year than non-referral hires. So if you aren’t leveraging your personal network in the recruitment process, you’re missing out on high-value opportunities.

4. Skipping the pre-screening phone call

You don’t want to waste time on a candidate that will never be a good fit for the role. Pre-screening phone calls, then, are an essential time management tool for your recruiting team. During these calls, you can quickly get a sense of the candidate’s:

By screening out obvious bad fits, you can ensure your recruiters (internal or external) are only spending time with candidates you might actually hire.

5. Hiring based on instinct

Sure, intuition plays a role in the hiring process. But relying on your gut too much can lead to biased and inconsistent decisions. Instead, it’s important to have some kind of standard hiring process to enable evidence-based hiring decisions.

Brightwing has a time-tested process that involves multiple stages of assessment and strategic planning to ensure we’re finding the best candidates for your needs.

6. Speaking before listening

To the best of your ability, you should avoid telling applicants what the ideal candidate looks like before you find out who they are and what they can do.

By opening the conversation to explore their intrinsic motivations, problem-solving skills, and perspectives, you gain insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. This approach not only respects the individuality of applicants but also enriches your understanding of how they might contribute uniquely to the team.

Avoid these recruitment mistakes with a dedicated talent partner

It can take a great deal of time and energy to avoid these recruitment mistakes. That’s why it’s a good idea to have a talent partner in your corner that can take the reins of the hiring process. Learn more about Brightwing’s tested process here.