7 costly mistakes in recruiting

Recruiting mistakes can have a serious impact on a company's efficiency and culture. This blog post highlights the most common mishaps in the recruitment process and offers practical solutions to avoid them. The aim is to provide recruiters and HR managers with the tools they need to optimally strengthen their team.

Biased, ambiguous or repetitive, keyword-stuffed job descriptions attract less suitable applicants at best. At worst, applicants are irrelevant. A good job description is like a sales pitch: you need to include more than a simple list of skills, duties and role requirements in your ad.

In today's TL;DR culture, the first few sentences need to grab candidates' attention. To attract the best candidates, your job ad must not only be compelling, but also give them a sense of your company culture and brand; good employees want to join organizations that reflect their own values and interests. A good job description should be written in simple language that still sells the job and your company and includes all relevant information.

The benefit: Good job descriptions inform and attract top applicants, not just people who need a job.

Recruiters instinctively post their vacancies on online job portals, which are easy to use, have achieved good results so far and are reasonably priced. However, this approach leads to countless unsuitable applications and is a common mistake in recruiting.

Technologies such as programmatic recruiting help to target the ideal candidates. But how do you know if the targeting was effective? Roughly speaking, one in 25 applicants should receive an offer. A figure based on statistics from 2020, according to which 4% of all applicants are hired. If the quantity of applications is too high, advertisements may be too vague and mostly unsuitable candidates will be approached.

The benefit: With the data-based approach, jobs are shown more quickly to potential candidates with a suitable profile.

Even if 47 million people in the US quit their jobs in 2021 (and another 4.3 million in January 2022), the end of home office regulations could lead to even more people thinking about quitting - and thus becoming passive job seekers. In January 2022, Bloomberg reported that more than half of workers are considering quitting before returning to the office. Passive candidates may be in an upright employment relationship and not actually actively looking for a new job, but at the same time are not averse to quitting as soon as they come across an attractive job advertisement.

The benefit: Targeting passive candidates via social media and display ads opens up a large pool of new applicants.

Not all applicants are suitable for a particular position - but this does not mean that a rejected person could not be considered for another position at a later date. Excluding rejected candidates is another recruiting mistake. Building a talent pool of qualified, interested applicants can significantly speed up the process of filling future positions; ask rejected applicants if you can keep in touch with them to let them know about future opportunities. You can either manage a list manually or contact them through a more formal talent pool structure.

Building a talent pool creates a group of 'warm leads', i.e. candidates who are already convinced by your company and are interested in a position with you. By maintaining a talent pool, you can reduce key metrics such as time to hire and cost to hire, while improving the overall quality of candidates.

The benefit: With a talent pool, you have a pre-qualified group of potential candidates.

A complicated and friction-filled application process leads to what is called “shopping cart abandonment” in e-commerce - buyers (applicants) are frustrated and do not complete the purchase (application). At a time when it is easy to apply for jobs, e.g. via LinkedIn, applicants prefer to respond to job postings to which they can apply immediately.

How important is it to be able to apply for a job easily? A survey by CareerBuilder found that most job seekers prefer a one-click response and are not interested in spending more than 10 minutes on an application. Uploading documents, taking too long to load or incorrect links are other recruiting mistakes that also lead to application abandonment.

Instead, companies can invest in technology that automatically fills in important information and saves applicants the time and frustration of manual data entry.

The benefit: More applications from jobseekers with whom your company has already made a good first impression.

Not knowing where candidates are coming from is almost as costly a mistake as having no candidates at all. It is crucial to have clarity about which ad, placed where, delivered the successful person. To do this, you need to set up a funnel tracking process that answers four questions:

Which sourcing channels are you using?
Where do most applications come from?
Where do most new hires come from?
Which channel is the most effective?

While most recruiters can easily answer the first two questions, the third and fourth questions are much more difficult to answer. Identifying the actual source of successful applications is an important data point in deciding which source works well and where to spend the budget.

The benefit: With effective funnel tracking, you know where your best applicants are coming from and can invest time and resources in a targeted manner, which leads to more positive results.

Surprisingly - or not - the average daily usage time of social media by users worldwide in 2022 is 147 minutes per day, compared to 145 minutes in the previous year. This also applies to job seekers: 80% of applicants use social media in their search. These statistics underline the fact that creating an employer brand is more relevant than ever, as social media is an important stage on which to showcase it.

Building an effective company brand is essential to maximizing job seeker awareness and retention. Activate your company's visual brand and voice on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to promote job openings, your company's image and values, and cultivate relationships with candidates of all ages.

The benefit: Visual, friendly content increases engagement with job seekers and builds an affinity that can translate into hired, engaged employees.

Joveo works with companies of all shapes and sizes around the world to turn costly recruiting mistakes into profits. Contact us today to find out how Joveo can help you make the most of your recruitment.