Top 10 Hiring Mistakes Employers Make (Part 2)

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frustrated with school or homeworkThe hiring process is the crucial gateway to your organization, which enables your organization to filter the candidate marketplace to ensure that only a stream of top talent flows into your organization.

It is vital, therefore, that you assess your hiring process from time-to-time to ensure it is in tip-top shape.

To help you do this, I have prepared a list of the top 10 hiring mistakes that employers make. I presented the first five hiring mistakes in part 1 of this article, and below you can find five more crucial hiring mistakes that employers make to round out the top 10 hiring mistakes that employers make.

5 Crucial Hiring Mistakes Employers Make

1. Not offering flexible interview options, such asfirst round video and outofhours interviews

Today’s top candidates are time pressured and highly mobile – working from hotels, restaurants, airplanes, airport lounges, you name it. Many top applicants, who may want to work for you may be deterred from applying for your role or attending an interview simply because they can’t quite fit into a rigid 9a.m.-5 p.m. on site and face-to-face interview regime. So, give them other options like first-round video interviewing and/or outside of working hours interview options so it is easy for the modern job seeker to engage with your organization. This approach should reduce delays and increase the number of quality applicants applying to your firm and graduating through the hiring process.

2. Not road testing and/or benchmarking your own hiring process

Your end to end hiring process, from job advertisements to closing the deal, may not be easy to navigate through and could be deterring applicants, but you can’t tell, as you aren’t the one working through it. So try to make sure that you put yourself in the position of the job seeker and see if you come across any hurdles or obstacles in your own application/hiring process.

3. Not conducting new hire surveys

Most firms conduct customer satisfaction surveys to assess the quality of their services. Employers should do the same in relation to their hiring process. New hires will have a clear and fresh picture in their mind as to the good and bad parts of your selection and assessment process. Learn from them by conducting new hire surveys and find out what areas of your hiring process you need to improve.

4. Not preparing highquality, social media integrated job descriptions

Job descriptions are the first contact point for you as an employer and are crucial to attracting talent, yet many employer job descriptions are below standard. As a minimum, a well-written job description should provide details of the job and personal requirements, but it should also include a description of company culture and philosophy, line manager/management style, opportunities for flexible working, and career and personal development opportunities because these are the factors that candidates are now considering when deciding to apply for a job. Think about incorporating a corporate video into your job description as research from CareerBuilder tells us that this will increase your number of job applicants.

5. Not conducting structured interviews

Many employers, particularly smaller employers, still recruit employees on an informal chat basis rather than a fully structured interview with a set of pre-designed questions based on the requirements of the role. I accept that structured interviews are by no means perfect, but their predictive accuracy is thought to be significantly higher than that of a chat. So, smaller employers should seriously consider structured interviewing if they are not yet doing so.

This list of hiring mistakes is meant to be both a thought piece and also a practical template that you can apply to your own current hiring process as a quality control mechanism which should hopefully lead to a more efficient and effective hiring process.

By Kazim Ladimeji