placeholder
Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

3 Recruiting Practices That Are on Their Way Out

Poor recruitment practices go beyond the possibility of inadequate staffing. For example:

  • Human Resources strains its operations and costs interviewing, hiring, training and monitoring employees performing below expectations.
  • Employees hired through poor recruiting require more attention and time from management. Managers should be developing the best talent to accomplish tasks in reduced times, not working on underdeveloped teams.
  • When recruitment is successful, good employees are focused on learning, achieving and getting the job done. At the other end of the spectrum, poor recruits need more time to get up to speed - if they ever do.
  • Customer service quality drops significantly when your team is constantly making or correcting errors and ill-advised decisions.
  • An underperforming team impacts all teams.
  • Company morale is at risk as good employees can resent poor performers as well management's tolerance of them.
  • Lower productivity that can result from poor performance will have a negative influence on budgets.
  • Ineffective recruiting leads to bad employee experiences, higher turnover rates, longer periods to fill metrics and damage to company reputation.

When surveyed, recruiters often admit to a problem, but often blame the glitches on forces beyond their control like not having enough resources to do their jobs. Another major reason is attributed to the department not being taken seriously financially and working with insufficient funding. Ironically, top dollar is going into other areas of the business while recruiters are expected to make those areas shine through recruitment. Another twist in the story is many recruiters believe they simply do not have the talent to recruit successfully.

While one can see the validity in these arguments, in some cases - maybe a lot of cases - poor recruitment is the direct result of recruiters using antiquated and simply bad recruitment practices. Even the best team could be deploying techniques that are hurting the process and the company.

Through smarter management and options like elearning companies, human resources and recruiters are discovering the newest and best ways to find talent, leading to poor practices being pushed out. In fact, here are three poor recruitment practices that are on their way out thanks to tighter operations.

Recruiters Failing to Nurture Relationships with Past Candidates

Recruiters are discovering the advantages of engaging with and nurturing prior candidate relationships. This has become easier through ATS platforms that manage communication and visibility with past talent. Social media like LinkedIn has proven beneficial to engagement. The issue is convincing recruiters of the solution's potential and deflecting the assumption they do not have time for it. Fortunately, many operations are coming around, seeing that learning and implementing these solutions now will lead to incredible sourcing efficiency later.

Better Requirement Management Minimizes Abundant Yet Narrow Candidate Pools

Even as ways of finding candidates become more proficient, hiring managers and recruiters are posting requirements that are either too broad or too restrictive. The good intent - finding the best possible talent for their opening - ends up being overwhelmed by a river of resumes from candidates, many of whom are throwing their credentials at the wall and hoping they stick. This can in turn lead to hiring the wrong person. As the savvy are discovering, developing sharp and concise descriptions relevant to aspects of the position, but leaving room for compromise, is advantageous. Understand training or coaching may be necessary and have a solid onboarding plan to get new hires up and running, instead of hoping to locate talent that comes ready out the box.

Overvaluing Quality and Losing Focus on Efficiency

Poor recruitment foregoes smart dispensing of time and money to focus on quality hires. We should focus on efficiency gains and time saving. ATSs allow recruiters to better manage the process, but many operations believe this investment is all they need. While a benefit, the ATS platform is limiting in accurate evaluation and potential success of talent. Organizations need to look for ways to improve the hiring experience beyond tech to decrease the rate of bad hires. Spending and devoting more time to how staff is recruiting will return an invaluable ROI.

Training and reeducation of hiring personnel needs to be implemented as a long term strategy for reducing overload and correcting poor recruitment practices.