Avoid these common hiring mistakes

Now that we’ve got well and truly stuck into 2021 and the Covid vaccination programme continues to be rolled out across the UK, many businesses are looking ahead with a sense of hope that we may be able to reclaim a sense of normality as the year marches on.

Many business leaders and owners will be looking at their staffing structures and working out where additional talent might be needed in order to make the most of the opportunities the coming months will bring.

For those who don’t have an in-house HR team, the task of identifying, developing and then implementing a recruitment strategy can be a little daunting.

Recruitment is a specialist skill. Done well, it means you’ll get the best talent available into your business, increasing your chances of adding to your bottom line.

Done badly, it can cost you money in trying to unpick the mistakes. In fact, conservative estimates suggest a bad hire can cost a business as much as 30% of that person’s annual salary.

Just think about that for a moment. The average UK salary in 2020, according to the Office of National Statistics, was £30,800. In London, that figure jumps to £37,250.

That puts the potential real-terms financial risk to your business of hiring the wrong person between £9,250 and £11,125. As a business leader you have to ask yourself whether that’s money you can afford to chalk up to a lesson learned.

I would always advise business leaders to use an HR and recruitment specialist to help find, appoint and retain the best of the talent on the market.

But if running a recruitment process is something you’re intent on doing yourself then there are some common mistakes that you’ll need to avoid in order to give yourself the best chance of finding the bright stars of tomorrow who will be the key to your future successes.

Here are 5 common hiring mistakes that non-specialists make – and how to navigate them:

1. Lack of preparation

There’s an old saying in life that failure to prepare is preparation to fail, and that’s true in the world of recruitment.

Most businesses have an idea of who they want to hire. I’ve lost count of the number of ads I see that ask for someone who can ‘think out of the box’, someone who’s ‘dynamic’, someone who’s looking to join a company with a ‘creative outlook’.

That’s all very well – and there’s nothing wrong with looking for someone who has those personality or cultural traits. But it fails to address the fundamental issue: can they do the job they’re hired to do.

Before you place an ad, sit down and work out what the role is that you want to fill. What are the tasks required to fulfil it? What are the outcomes you need from it? What practical, implementable skills does someone need to have to be able to do it.

Once you have the right job description you can use that as a benchmark for everything that follows – and you’ll also find it useful when it comes to appraising the successful candidate in the future.

2. Hiring in your own image

Businesses that think better perform better, which means many businesses thrive by putting a value on new thinking. Yet many businesses suffer from a ‘not invented here’ mentality that makes them reluctant to hire people who bring something new with them.

Similarly, many businesses tend to hire from the same small pool. They advertise posts on the same job boards and they attract the same narrow pool of candidates.

By widening your thinking and finding new talent seams to mine, you’ll improve your chances of seeing a wider range of candidates who, collectively, boast a wider range of skills and thinking.

3. Not benchmarking the shortlist

Everyone looks good on paper – or should do. After all, the CV is the one thing people have had the time to finesse and refine so it does the best possible job of making them look like the ideal candidate.

But to really save wasted time, it’s important to determine your selection criteria. There are many ways of doing this – and if you don’t have in-house resources to do it for you an independent HR consultant will be able to help – but a simple scoring system is the minimum level of assessment you should use.

Based on a candidate’s experience and training, how does their ability to fulfil the job description rank in pure numbers.

And once you have the shortlist, arrange short pre-interview phone calls with each of them to weed out any who have over-exaggerated their suitability for the role.

4. Asking closed questions

The interview is the key stage of any recruitment process, yet many hiring managers fail to make the best use of it.

Checking off a candidate’s skills against a job description is only part of the process. But if you really want to know if a candidate can operate effectively within a team, don’t ask them if they can operate effectively in a team, because you won’t get the answer you’re looking for.

Can you work in a team? is a closed question, meaning it will only ever elicit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer – and I’ll tell you now that there isn’t a candidate in any job interview who will tell you they can’t do something.

Instead, ask them to give you an example of how they’ve worked effectively within a team, which forces them to give examples of how they worked as well as the outcomes the team achieved.

Much more useful, right?

5. Failing to check references in person

There’s an assumption that any reference voluntarily offered up by a candidate is inevitably going to paint that candidate as a stellar hire. That’s probably true – almost certainly is true – if you just send an email with a checklist.

Having a short phone conversation with a referee about someone you’re planning to pay good money to do a job for you is a sensible investment of your time – and you’ll get a much better feel for that candidate as a new member of your team

In the end, these are just the 5 most common mistakes businesses make when they’re hiring new talent, but I always think businesses get the candidates their hiring processes deserve.  The better the process, the better the candidate you’ll see and the better the candidate you’ll hire.

If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can help your HR team or business recruit the best talent on the mafrket, please get in touch for an informal chat.