10 Hiring Mistakes that Cost Your Business

Human resources teams who are trying to ensure a stronger candidate pool and more reliable, long-term hires—take note. These common pitfalls can cost your company not just money, but time, stress, employee morale, reputation and much more. Some of these may already be old hat for your HR staff, but we're going to dive deeper into the world of transformative recruiting and hiring.

Here are the top five hiring mistakes that can cost your business, big time...

1. No Recruitment Strategy

If you aren’t using a specific strategy, you will spend more time recruiting than you need to. Wasted time means wasted money, both of which could be better allocated to onboarding and training new employees - the kind of HR strategy that keeps employees longer.

2. Lack of Consistency

A good recruiting strategy is always rooted in consistency - consistency in how you qualify each applicant and consistency in your hiring process. Clearly defining a "qualified candidate" creates a standardized process with clear-cut framework to so you're making consistent decisions. This carries over into onboarding; you need to have a repeatable process when its time to make a hire.

3. Losing Applications

Don't forget, your strong candidates can easily get lost in the fray without a plan in place for ensuring that their resumes stay at the top of the pile. The volume of applicants can be overwhelming, and without a strong system for organizing and vetting them, your HR team is undoubtedly missing out on great talent that simply gets lost in the shuffle. Make clear skill categories to help you organize all your applications. If you have an applicant tracking system, take advantage of tags and profiles so you can always find your strong candidates.

4. Failing to Clearly Define Culture and Values

Millennials dominate today’s workforce and are interviewing and making job decisions based largely on how they feel they align with a given business’s company culture. If your business profile and hiring materials do not clearly communicate your company culture, candidates will have a difficult time assessing if they have the same values, or a passion for your mission. The reverse is also true - without a clear company culture, you can’t be sure that you are attracting the types of employees. Put your heart out there! The right candidates will come.

5. Leaving Out the Office Environment

Is it casual dress or business professional? Do you have one large space for collaborative work or divided offices for individual concentration? It may not have occurred to you that this matters much to prospective employees, but it does, particularly to Millennials. In addition to transmitting your work culture, advertise what a day in the office looks like. This helps applicants picture themselves in the role and makes them more likely to engage.

6. Forgetting Your Brand

Employees represent your company in and out of the office, so selecting employees that reflect your values and portray your brand in a positive way is important. Keep your brand in mind in from job ads to interviewing. Are you talking to someone who will add to your brand? Are you communicating your brand identity so the right people apply?

7. Not Advertising to Your Candidates

Today’s savvy job seekers are looking at more than just job boards. What are you doing to get your openings in front of them? A strong job-posting strategy should include job boards, social media posting and advertising, industry publications and any relevant trade-shows or local job fairs.

8. Not Conducting a Background Check

Protect Your Company: Failing to conduct a background check is very risky. It’s easy enough for someone to lie about their past in hopes of securing a future with your company, and you don’t want to be the company that pays for it. Avoid on-the-job incidents and protect your company’s assets by doing background checks—every time.

9. Passing on Conditional Offers

Putting in writing that any offer of employment is conditional upon passing a background check protects you from legal ramifications if you decide to retract your offer. Make sure you have an existing policy documenting in detail what types of backgrounds you can and can’t hire and reasons why.

10. Ignoring References

Ignoring the Truth: According to a recent survey from CareerBuilder, a whopping 56% of the 2,500 hiring managers surveyed have discovered that a candidate lied on their resume. If you don’t check references, you won’t be able to verify that you are dealing with a truthful candidate.

11. Asking the Wrong Questions

All candidates are more than their appearance on paper or the strong interview or two they can pull out. What were they really like to work with? What are their strengths and weaknesses according to others who have worked with them? If you don’t seek this information, you are not truly vetting your potential new employee to the degree necessary to maximize the chances of a good fit.

Reviewing your hiring process can make a real difference in the quality and reliability of the candidates you find as well as the employees you decide to hire. Putting a process in place is easier than you might think, and there is plenty of support available. Give us a call here at Pre-Select and we can help you brainstorm best-practice hiring solutions.