Bad habits are difficult to unlearn once you’ve been doing it for a significant amount of time. It starts to affect your behavior, and this would eventually become evident in how you handle everyday situations. Always late when showing up for appointments? That’s going to leave a mark. Dressing inappropriately during business meetings? Bad impression. Poor hygiene? Let’s not even go there.
Old habits die hard, but if you start becoming aware of them and realize you need to make some changes, you may have gained enough resolve to overhaul what you’ve perceived as the norm. And when you’ve cleaned up your slate, you are ready to start making some good ones and jump back on the right track. This is applicable in all kinds of situations.
In the field of recruitment, HR professionals from a company or a recruitment agency may have also developed lousy habits that need to be broken. This should be done as soon as possible so you can streamline the hiring process and start finding the right employees who will work for you. To raise awareness so you could address them, here are some of the bad hiring habits you need to change as soon as possible:
1. Rushed hiring process
Employers look for potential candidates for some reasons: to fill a void left by a former employee, when there is an increase in workload and when a new department opens among other others. Recruiters would want to fill these roles as fast as possible to stay on track and maintain productivity.
While time is of the essence, rushing the hiring process is never a good idea since this will likely force you into forgoing your strategy, putting you in a worse situation. This will lead to confusion, overlooked or mistakenly magnified skills and eventually, low-quality hires.
It is essential to stick to your hiring process regardless of how fast you need an employee to fill a position. There’s a reason why it’s there, so don’t stray from it. But if there is a dire need to speed things up, there should be an established strategy.
2. Not creating and sticking to candidate personas
Candidate personas are semi-fictional profiles of ideal candidates for any given position, making it a recruiter’s guide throughout the hiring process. They include essential information such as career history, education, and skills among others.
These profiles help you be more precise in targeting a candidate during your search, so you know exactly what you’re looking for. While creating these profiles may seem to be a waste of time, particularly when you need to fill positions, they are an essential resource in the recruitment process. As such, you need to put effort into creating candidate personas. Get into it, dive deep into their profiles, and reap the benefits.
3. Putting interview as the last step
If you’ve been in the recruitment business for quite some time, you will notice that some candidates are more accomplished in interviews than others. They can sit down with you and say all the right things, but you can’t actually know right away if these candidates can perform well in the job.
Many recruiters put interview as the last step in the hiring process thinking this is the most effective way to find out if they’ve found the right candidate, but the truth is, they may have just found a remarkable interviewee rather than the perfect candidate.
The best way to approach this is to give your candidates a quick assessment test during or after the interview. This gives you the opportunity to know if they can back up their claims.
4. Outdated recruitment technology
Advancements in technology have revolutionized processes in many businesses across different industries. Some upgrades are meant to help make your recruitment efforts faster and more effective, so you need to keep up with the trends to boost your chances of finding the perfect candidate for the job.
To speed up the process and be more targeted in your search, you can utilize AI-assisted automation in key stages of the recruitment process. You will be able to screen qualified candidates from a large pool through the help of a virtual assistant that uses artificial intelligence to do most of the grunt work. This helps you focus on more important matters such as the engagement and assessment of candidates.
5. Vague job description
The hiring process should be a two-way street: both candidates and employers are expected to be honest with each other. This means they should be truthful about their professional history and skill sets, while you should be clear about the job they are trying to apply for.
The absence of a clear and accurate job description may lead to frustrated candidates who may not know where to focus their efforts. Vague job postings create a myriad of problems for both you and the candidate particularly in setting the salary and scope of his or her job.
It is imperative that you give a proper, concise and well-defined job description to candidates so you can cover the company’s most immediate needs and talent gaps with the right person for the job. Keep in mind that ambiguous job descriptions may not be sending a specific enough message to attract the best candidate that your company is looking to hire.
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Once you’ve identified these bad habits and garnered much success in your recruiting efforts, always remember that there is still room for improvement. Humans are prone to mistakes and developing bad habits, so it’s our job to be responsible for correcting them as soon as possible.
Now, before you launch into your next candidate search, take a moment to think about your recruitment strategy. You will surely find areas to improve on or errors you can correct at each stage. This will help you make the necessary changes to streamline your overall hiring process, making you more efficient and successful in growing your company’s workforce.
