Avoid These 6 Recruiting Mistakes
Recruiting can be very easy and straight-forward, as long as you know how, and we’ll be writing a series of short articles to (hopefully!) give you an insight on how to recruit effectively. Our first topic is the most common mistakes people make when recruiting, and one step to start recruiting effectively is to simply avoid making the mistakes outlined below – simple! 1. Having a salary that isn’t competitive or consistent with market rates.
If you’re not competitive with your salary, people either won’t apply to your job, or you will receive candidates whose level of experience matches your salary range. If you’re not paying enough, the candidates that apply might not match the calibre that you’re expecting. You need to have realistic expectations for both the calibre and quantity of applications you receive, based on your advertised salary. For example, if you want to recruit a Manager but you’re only paying £20,000 – you are extremely unlikely to have people of management level with good experience applying to your job. 2. Sourcing candidates from limited resources.
If you only advertise on your own website, you’re going to really limit the number of people that see your job since people need to know about your company before they’d even think to visit your website to see if you have any openings. The same holds true for advertising across only 1 or 2 external places or job boards – you won’t reach the whole market that’s available to you. Suppose that you run an advertisement on one external website and it reaches 30% of the total job seeking market. Now think of how many people out of that 30% will be ideal for your specific role – probably not a lot. You need to give yourself the best chance possible, and the only way to do this is to target the widest range of job-seekers possible. 3. Building a candidate pipeline for non-existent positions.
Doing this really makes no sense whatsoever. You’ll create a ton of extra administration work for yourself, and you’ll be unfairly giving job-seekers false hope that there is a potential job for them. Not to mention, candidates are usually only live for a short amount of time if they are actively job seeking, so there is very little point in keeping a static database of people. By the time you do have an opening and go back through the list, you’ll probably find that the candidates who once applied are now no longer interested. 4. Confusing years of experience with competency.
Using years’ experience can be a good benchmark, but it immediately disregards candidates that have the drive and ability to do the job well. If a candidate looks great on paper but only lacks an arbitrary number of years working within a role, why not interview them anyway? They might be a great personality fit for your organisation. If they have most of the skills and knowledge required and have the tenacity to be successful within the role, give them a go – even if they lack a few years’ experience. Motivated people tend to excel greatly, so use this to your advantage. 5. Engaging with the wrong type of external company for your needs.
I’ll be doing another article on the types of recruitment company out there (and their pros and cons!) at a later date, but as an example, if you need a consultative service, then engaging with a company who only re-sells job board advertising space isn’t going to match your requirements. 6. Not writing effective job advertisements.
If you don’t write adverts with the correct job title and keywords, it won’t reach the right people. If you stuff your advert or job title with many different keywords, it will have the same effect. There’s a fine balance between the two. There are quite a few other components to consider when drafting job advertisements, that’s why we'll be giving some tips on Advert Writing itself in our next article – stay tuned!