Make Recruitment a Dream, Not a Nightmare – The Biggest Recruitment Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

What do you picture when you’re looking to hire a professional? Perhaps someone who works hard, brings in business and establishes rapport with your customers, raising the reputation of your company. Now while that all sounds like a dream come true, I’m sure you don’t have to be told that it doesn’t happen all of the time.  

The flip side of this is a recruitment nightmare. A hire gone wrong can mean wasted hours and dollars spent on-boarding and training and reduced morale within the team. With the wrong fit, it’s likely the first to notice will be your customers! 

Needless to say, those who are in the game of recruitment have a lot at stake. Avoiding these crucial errors will help you to sleep soundly when you make recruiting decisions. 

1) Know exactly what you’re looking for

Having a well thought out position description works in two ways.  Firstly it should help to direct job seekers as to whether their skills and experiences are enough to get them across the line. You can save time sifting through resumes by including a polite statement along the lines of “those without the minimum qualifications need not apply”. By spending extra time preparing a position description in more detail, you will also form more tangible expectations of your ideal candidate whereby you can quantify how many boxes each applicant ticks against your criteria, rather than going with a gut-feeling. 

2) Work within your niche

A huge mistake that many make when advertising a job in a specific field is to advertise it on a gigantic, generic job board. The risks here include having your add lost in the depths of the hundreds of other similar positions and frustratingly, having applicants without the relevant tertiary qualifications trying their luck and applying anyway. Using a more specific job board, ensures your job advertisement gets seen by the right people and the right people only. 

3) Don’t forget to consider recruiting internally 

Candidates already within your team are your best asset. Working to up-skill your workforce with continuous professional development can help you to move your employees step up to a bigger role. This may leave a lower ranked position vacant, for which hiring is less of a risk. Another benefit of promoting existing members is significantly boosting employee morale, thereby increasing staff retention. 

4) Keep up with the times 

You are aware that gone are the days of posting a job ad in your local paper. What you may not know is that even non-mobile friendly webpages may not make the cut on the market preferred by the upcoming generation in the workforce. Research suggests that around 80% of millennials expect to be able to browse and apply for jobs on their smart phone. Advertising your job in a way that is highly accessible on the World Wide Web, not only via a computer monitor, but also smart phone and tablet can help you to avoid losing out to the more tech savvy competition when looking to pick up fresh new faces for your business. 

5) Don’t waste your time meeting candidates too soon 

Job interviews take time and are expensive; for an hour long interview, your hourly rate multiplied by the number of job interviews conducted equals a costly process – which if used in isolation may lead you to making a bad hire! Avoid going straight into interviewing everyone and anyone that simply look good on paper. Resumes can be deceiving but questionnaires, especially well formulated psychometric questionnaires, can help paint an unbiased picture of your candidates. They can do much of the work for you and can help you to eliminate those who may not be appropriate  for the job before scheduling out your precious time.

Recruiting right the first time saves time and money. Not to mention helping those in your business to meet their full potential. 

If you would like to chat about an assessment based recruitment approach we would welcome your call.   

Working with assessment partner, Psych Press, Capable People’s recruitment process integrates the full strength of online assessments and video interviewing for fast, job-fit relevant, data-driven results.

• Using science not ‘face value’ – our assessments are catered to industry, role, and function and are able to pinpoint the most promising talent from a large pool of candidates
• We learn about your goals + company  – to  design  custom campaigns and assessments that are tailored to your situation, not just ‘off the shelf’ solutions
• Fast and cost effective – As more and more applicants are online nowadays, so are we! Our online approach allows us to give you great candidates faster, and we’re also able to budget flexibly based on your needs.

Need Capable People? Contact us on 03 9670 4275 or email info@capablepeople.com.au to find out how we can assist your next campaign.

Psychometric Assessments and Hiring Staff

An ever increasing number of employers are identifying the benefits of psychometric testing and are reaping the rewards of adding it to their recruitment process. Gone are the days where ‘gut feeling’ was an acceptable justification, decisions must now be based on tangible, objective data. Furthermore, current research suggests that replacing a skilled-person can cost an employer upwards of 150% of that employee’s annual salary. This means that even one bad hire can be extremely costly! This is where psychometric assessment comes in. Whilst there may be a bewildering array of psychometric assessments on offer, they all aim to provide objective data about a person. This data may be on the candidates’ personality attributes, past behaviours, and intellectual abilities. This information can then be used to predict future occupational success aka: job performance in a wide variety of workplace environments, including sales, human services and even the defence force.  This data can be used to predict how your future employees make decisions when under pressure or how likely they are to damage positive relationships with customers or clients. The objective results that are obtained are comparable between different prospects; to ensure you choose the right person for the job and be safe in the knowledge that you haven’t overlooked anyone you have screened. It is important to note that Psychometric Assessments should never be used as the be-all-end-all. They are most effective when screening potential employees, as simply relying on a resume and interview allows the prospect to tell you exactly what you want to hear. There is currently a lot of talk about Unconscious Bias and the best way of managing this is through supporting your keen observations with the objective, comparable data that psychometric testing provides. Employers are often concerned about how difficult they think these tests may be to deliver and interpret. Fortunately, you don’t need a degree in psychology to understand them! Psychometric assessments are written using plain, ‘real world’ language, so that any employer can easily understand what is being measured, why it is important to them and how their candidates’ results compare to the ‘average’ result of a relevant population (i.e. managers or graduates etc…) All of this allows the employer to determine if a candidate is suitable for such a role, how successful they will be and if they will fit the culture of the organisation or team. Psychometric assessments can also be tailored to meet the employer’s individual needs based on the specific attributes and qualities an employer is looking for in potential candidates. Psychometric tests can be used in recruitment for culture-fit, team-fit, role-fit and a candidates potential to be trained. Assessments can also be used for existing employee training and retention purposes as well. Assessments allow you to profile employees, identifying their strengths, development areas and work styles.  This data can be used for promotions and to reorganise work-flow. By reallocating tasks to employees to suit their work style you can increase engagement, productivity and job satisfaction, leading to a happier and more efficient workplace. If you are interested in learning more about psychometric assessments to help you hire the right people, please speak with Dr. Gavin Didsbury or a consultant from our assessment partner PsychPress who provide a variety of psychometric assessment solutions. Please call on 03 9670 0590 or email info@psychpress.com.au.