Hiring: What People Should Avoid?

You may be using the best recruitment techniques, but if you don’t approach the hiring process the right way, you may fail. The US Department of Labor concludes the losses due to a bad hire can be as high as 30% of their yearly salary. Many HR professionals add that it’s a strain on productivity as well.

If you don’t want your company to suffer these losses, study these 8 mistakes that will ruin your hiring campaign.

Needless hires

Sure, when somebody leaves the company, you definitely need to replace them. But not all hires are like this. Often, when a department can’t handle the number of tasks, they ask the HR office to arrange a hire. But it’s not always necessary.

Asking for a new person to join the team is way easier than doing a complex audit, drawing up work flow charts, and managing your workload to be optimal. This is why so many departments of successful companies get bloated.

It’s a good thing if you think HRs are there to give jobs to nice people. If you think HRs should do what’s best for the company, it’s better to make sure every hire is necessary, or the company will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for no reason.

Looking for a hero

This is the problem many successful startups have. You start out with a couple of very talented people who are proficient in many fields. In many startups, success comes because of expertise, not good planning. These people combine multiple roles and make the startup great despite somewhat chaotic planning.

When one of them leaves, HRs start looking for someone with their skill set, someone who can save the company from going bankrupt. Needless to say, when you start looking for an employee who can do frontend, backend, and design while handling clients at the same time, you won’t find many people.

If you find yourself looking for that kind of competence, you may want to split up the requirements and hire several people instead.

Using the ATS wrong

Applicant tracking systems are an essential tool in HR’s toolbox. However, if you use this tool in the wrong way, it will only worsen the chances of finding a good candidate.

The common mistake people make when working with an ATS is setting it to only show the best candidates. Don’t cast such a shallow net. You need to find all the people who can be suitable for the position, not only the best ones. Otherwise, you may be left with no candidates when the ones your ATS found bail on you.

Not enclosing the salary

This is a mistake many employers make, even the biggest ones. They’re not telling the salary in the job ad. For many people who are looking for a job this marks your ad as less favorable. Why would you go through the burden of submitting a resume, talking over the phone, and going to the interview only to find out that the salary you’ll get is $5,000 shorter of what you’d expected?

It’s just too uncertain, especially so if there are dozens of other companies who state outright how much money an employee can receive. This is why you should always mention the salary. If it depends on the interview, put an average number there and specify it can vary.

In fact, a good deal of your hiring campaign’s success relies on the job ad. Test how effective it is on a meeting with your colleagues and use proofreading services like Essay Writer or Grammarly to make sure the tone is right.

Interview without specialists

As an HR who has worked in a specific industry for quite a while, it’s easy to think that you can assess a candidate’s skill set on your own. It’s a common mistake to think this way, but unless you know all the technical details and new trends of the industry, you probably can’t do that.

Schedule all interviews to make sure an expert can be involved. This will ensure no new hires have to be let go after a probation period.

Brainteasers instead of work examples

Both startups and older companies take a hint from Google and ask their interviewees brainteasers. These kinds of riddles are made to gauge future employees’ wittiness and the ability to think creatively. After all, Google is using it, so it’s the best interview practice out there.

If you’re all for following Google’s standards, you should drop this practice. The company states that they’ve discontinued asking brainteasers because they failed to predict performance.

Instead, they use work samples. Ask your potential hire to do a bit of work while you’re watching, and you’ll get far more knowledge about them than if you asked them a riddle.

Stopping when a good hire is found

Sometimes, you need to fill in a position urgently, and you’re tempted to shake hands with the first person who meets the standards. It may feel great to finally find the one, but don’t stop the process there.

You may be missing a potentially better candidate if you ask the one you like to start working on Monday.

Trusting the references

Did you know that 56% of HR specialists have caught a person lying on their resume? Sure, you can’t fake skills and an interview will show that. But if a person is okay with telling a lie, maybe they’re not that good of a hire even with their skill set.

Do the due diligence and check with their university and former employers. If the employers they claimed they worked for don’t recognize them, it’s a huge red flag.

Wrap Up

HR is not the kind of job you can fake it till you make it. If you try to, your company may be losing thousands upon thousands of dollars a month.

After reading this article you won’t commit the 8 main HR failures and you’re a better HR for it. Don’t stop there, subscribe to our blog to learn more about the industry trends.

Kalibrr is a technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, the company continues to attract the best talent from all over, with almost three million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 19,000 clients and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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