Recruiting the right candidate is included in every HR team’s goals. Well-chosen employees contribute a great deal to positive and productive workplace culture, smooth business operations, company stability, high team morale, and more.
To secure these benefits, it’s your responsibility in HR to adopt a fool-proof approach in your search for the perfect talent. This means identifying errors in your recruitment process since any loophole may affect the quality of results in your hiring.
A good practice is to make an audit of your selection process, focusing on possible risks and planning how to mitigate them.
1. Not looking beyond your ideal candidate
Even in recruitment, we also have that concept of “The One,” which describes the ideal candidate that you want to hire. However, if you focus your search on your ideal candidate, you might miss out on other equally qualified candidates. It’s simply wrong to assume that there is a single person who has the exact set of skills, values, and attitude that will make that candidate eligible to be a part of your team.
Recruitment firms should avoid falling into the trap of getting fixated on the perfect candidate by balancing the profiling credentials provided by hiring managers. Being an HR manager doesn’t necessarily mean they know the full range of candidates in the job market, so you’ll need to fill the gap between what HR managers know and your first-hand experience in finding and selecting talent.
2. Letting hiring managers interview candidates without proper orientation or training
This is not to undermine the ability of hiring managers to conduct job interviews. But, failing to discuss with your hiring managers what they’re expected to accomplish during the interview process can result in wasted company resources.
Therefore, it’s a must for hiring managers to be well-guided about the different aspects of the interview process. This includes the proper way of interacting with candidates or the set of questions that they should and should not ask.
As a general rule, you should refrain from asking questions related to cultural differences, religious views, or sociopolitical factors that might elicit feelings of discrimination among candidates.
Hiring managers would also benefit from knowing what type of interview should be conducted, whether it’s structured, unstructured, behavioral, problem-solving, or panel interview. Only then can they determine the right kind of strategies before the scheduled meeting.
3. Having a single approach to reaching out to candidates
Just like how it is when you limit your views as to what an ideal candidate should be, there is a risk in using a single approach to candidate sourcing. This kind of strategy stifles your chance to be more innovative in the way you discover, attract, and retain talent.
Since the job market is evolving – including how candidates choose to communicate with potential employers – you have to be visible and accessible on the various recruitment channels that candidates use when looking for a job.
It’s also vital for you to determine where to find active and passive candidates, which could be a combination of job ads, employee referrals, job fairs, and social media recruitment, to mention a few.
4. Focusing too much on the resume
The resume is the starting point in your candidate selection. Unfortunately, some candidates don’t get past this stage, which might speak of how little time you’re willing to dedicate in selecting your best possible candidate.
For example, there are times when resumes are sent to the bottom pile for a variety of factors: the resume isn’t well crafted, a candidate failed to tailor the resume according to the position you’re offering, or other similar reasons. Additionally, you might be unaware that you’re favoring a particular candidate only because they came from a prestigious university or firm.
Whatever the case is, determining a candidate’s worth based solely on the resume isn’t a diligent way of screening potential employees. To rectify the situation, you should spend the time to review resumes and portfolio thoroughly, and conduct phone interviews to give all suitable candidates a fair chance of being considered for the job.
5. Relying only on face-to-face interviews
Face-to-face interviews are a valuable part of the hiring process, but they may be tainted by prejudice, too. When you meet a candidate for the first time, you might see that person as shy or confident, fluent or inarticulate, and the like. This is part of human nature. Unfortunately, this manner of grouping or categorizing candidates in your subconscious can influence your evaluation of that person.
To hire people based on skills, not just on extrinsic factors, you could come up with various ways to assess candidates during personal interviews. You could provide practical tasks on the spot to really test a candidate’s competence. Alternatively, you could implement blind recruiting, which uses specialized software or tools to eliminate bias or discrimination in hiring.
Parting Shot
Hiring is a multi-pronged process for HR teams and recruitment firms, and overlooking some factors along the way could be easy. By knowing problem areas early on, you could prevent a lopsided approach in recruiting your company’s future employees.
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