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.

The Rise of Video Interviews

Traditional face-to face job interviews are becoming a thing of the past.  With a world of technology at your fingertips, screening applicants through online can help to save you valuable time, whilst ensuring that only the best applicants proceed to the final stages of your recruitment process. Here are 5 reasons why video interviews are on the rise.

Put down the phone

Replacing an initial follow up phone call with a video interview can offer a better insight by allowing you to see the candidate’s body language. You can achieve the same results as a phone interview, but with a stronger grasp on who the candidate really is. Rather than meeting a candidate based only off a resume, video screening ensures only the candidates with the suitable qualities will be making it through to the next stage of the recruitment process.

Keep it focused

With a traditional face-to-face interview, the interview can go astray due to distractions in the office or side conversations that you may have with the candidate. This side-chat may also be a source of unconscious bias over who will progress through to further stages. Through online screening, the candidates all have the same questions and an allotted amount of time to answer each question.  Video interviewing brings uniformity and professionalism to the recruitment process.

No need for nerves

As each candidate conducts their video interview in their own time and space. Not only convenient, interviewing online may reduce interview anxiety. As the candidates are in a comfortable setting, it allows you to truly grasp their capabilities, unmasked by the negative stress job interviews often bring.

Be kind, rewind

Need to review your candidates? Easy! Just click replay! The convenience of a video not only allows for you to watch their interviews again, allowing you to compare and contrast promising candidates, having their key qualities fresh in your mind at all times.

Pass it on

Gone are the days of having a panel of hiring managers or directors spend their valuable time sitting through hours of interviews. Relevant sections of promising interviews can be shared amongst your other hiring managers with the click of a button.                                                                                                                  

Boundaryless  recruitment

Where potential candidates used to be those within arm’s reach, with video interviews, applicants can be screened from all corners of the globe. You can find great talent interstate and overseas. Video interviews efficiently and cost-effectively assess and engage with this previously untapped talent pool.

      

Less time, more candidates

Video interviewing allows you to rank and review vast amounts of applicants in minimal time. Time is money, and where with traditional interviews, the number of applicants you can consider is restricted, screening online allows you to ensure promising candidates are not missed due to logistics.

Did you like the sounds of video interviewing? Voice advantage is a sleek and advanced interviewing platform designed to relieve recruiters and hiring managers of all the manual and follow up activities in interviewing, whilst giving you the true voice of a candidate’s potential. Please take a quick 3 minutes to 'put yourself in the interviewees shoes' and take the demo here. Or learn more about how it all works in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch? 

 or visit http://www.psychpress.com.au/psychometric/voice-advantage/