Three Things to Avoid When Recruiting New Staff

When you are a recruitment or staffing agency, you know far more about hiring, interviewing and evaluating candidates than the average business, however there are still some mistakes you can make when it comes to hiring your own recruits. When you are recruiting for recruiters, you are usually dealing with people who also know recruitment very well, so their expectations are often higher than the average job candidate you place in roles with other companies – so to get the best talent, it is important to do things right. Here are three things to avoid:
Overly Long Interview Processes
You probably have clients who insist on making candidates jump through a lot of hoops, with interview processes that require them to keep on going back to meet with just about every head of department and sometimes even other things like written tests. You therefore probably know first hand how frustrating an overly long interview process can be. If you have a lot of people you want your interviewees to talk to before a decision is made, try and schedule a full day where you’ll all interview each candidate, so the whole process can be kept to one day for both yourselves, and the candidates (after perhaps an initial phone interview stage to shortlist the best applicants). Also, ask yourself if all of those people really need to, or want to be involved in interviewing for this role, or if the job’s line manager might really be the only person who needs to do it.

Overselling Working Conditions
A fairly common thing for managers to do in interviews is oversell things like flexible working arrangements or working from home. A lot of candidates see the option to work from home sometimes as a real selling point, but be realistic about it when asked. If you aren’t necessarily against it but nobody actually does it, or you have some home working but it’s generally only when agreed well in advance for some kind of personal emergency, manage their expectations rather than making it seem like you’ll be fine with them only being in the office one day a week.

Being Slow with a Decision
The longer you take to make up your mind which candidate to offer the job to, the more you risk losing them. Taking days after the final interview to make an offer can also make the candidate feel like your business is inefficient or that filling this role isn’t that important to you, which may not really bode well. Just as you obviously want your clients to make fast decisions so you don’t lose candidates who are waiting for news after an interview, you should decide and act immediately after your interview process finishes. If a promising candidate is going to have to wait for a decision for a number of days because you have other interviews scheduled after them, then let them know this in the interview so they don’t see the delay as slow decision making.

These three recruitment mistakes are ones even veteran recruiters have been known to make, so make sure you avoid them next time you are hiring!