When it comes to hiring new employees, the stakes are high. Every time you make a hiring mistake, you're left with the costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training a replacement. These costs can add up quickly and may even jeopardize your company's budget.
To protect your bottom line, prepare properly before recruiting and hiring. To help you do this, we're exploring the most common hiring mistakes and how you can avoid them.
What are the most common hiring mistakes?
Companies often make common hiring mistakes for various reasons, including:
- Rushing to fill a role
- Going with a familiar face or a ready choice
- Overlooking cultural fit
- Failing to verify qualifications
- Not utilizing the right hiring technology and tools
The result is a slow and inefficient hiring process that leads to inconsistent or biased hiring choices and missed opportunities to hire great people.
Here are some of the most common hiring mistakes and how to avoid them:
Hiring Mistake #1: Writing vague or unrealistic job descriptions
Unclear, ill-defined, or incorrect job descriptions are recruitment mistakes that set your hiring process on the wrong path from the start.
If you don't cite the specific skills, experience, and personality traits you need, candidates may wonder if they are qualified and hesitate to apply. If you set unrealistic requirements, you may chase off the ideal candidate.
Combining several roles into one can severely limit the number of candidates to choose from.
How to fix this:
Prevent vague or unrealistic job descriptions by starting with a list of “must-have” job qualifications. Be specific about what is essential regarding education, experience, and soft skills.
You can follow up by adding “nice-to-have” qualifications that attract exceptional candidates without driving away good ones.
Use hiring profiles that outline the traits and qualities essential to the position when writing the job posting. Avoid combining multiple, very different roles into one, as this creates a position that most candidates can't imagine themselves in.
Hiring Mistake #2: Rushing or moving too slowly
Rushing the hiring process and dragging it out both lead to poor outcomes.
If you take too long to make a hiring decision, you risk losing qualified candidates. A Robert Half survey about lengthy hiring processes found that:
- 39% of applicants lose interest and pursue other roles.
- 18% of applicants decide to stay in their current job.
- 32% of applicants question your company's ability to make other decisions.
Bad hiring practices include making decisions too quickly. Rushed or impulsive hiring decisions without properly vetting and testing job candidates first can be disastrous.
The right pace strikes a balance between thorough evaluation and timely action.
How to fix this:
After defining the role and qualities of the ideal candidate, select pre-employment assessments that quickly identify the strongest potential hires.
Establish a clear interview timeline. Use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to automate screening, scheduling, testing, and follow-up, to ensure the workflow remains efficient.
Organize your candidate pipeline with a system that tracks applicant progress, compares testing scores, and gives high-level, data-driven insights.
Hiring Mistake #3: Not selling the role well
Job postings give candidates their first impression of your company. Poor job listings won't attract top talent, and they also cost you the opportunity to highlight what makes your company special and rewarding as an employer.
How to fix this:
Write job listings that “sell” your company and the opportunity.
When crafting listings, use ideal candidate profiles to focus on the position benefits. Talk about growth opportunities, company culture, and your mission, as well as required qualifications and experience.
Tailor the language to appeal to the right personality types. For instance, if you need a Type A personality for a role, mention how much opportunity, independence, and potential for reward the position promises.
Hiring Mistake #4: Not using the right technology
A common hiring mistake is failing to use the right hiring technology.
Consider adopting:
- Automation tools, like an ATS
- AI recruiting tools for screening and tracking data
- Pre-employment testing software for candidate insights that don't show up on a résumé
Not using technology puts your hiring at a disadvantage, slowing it, increasing bias, and hiding the best candidates.
How to fix this:
Invest in technology, including newer AI options, that streamlines tasks, identifies strong candidates, and facilitates scheduling and organization.
Consider investing in pre-employment testing that objectively measures candidates' skills, reveals their personality traits, and determines their cultural fit.
With good information and more free time, you can use resources more strategically and focus on the best candidates. It helps your hiring process be smart, fair, consistent, and fast.
Hiring Mistake #5: Failing to verify qualifications
According to CareerBuilder, 74% of employers have hired the wrong person for a position. Not taking the time to verify a candidate's qualifications or check references can result in a costly hiring mistake.
Candidates sometimes exaggerate their skills and experience, or use AI tools to tailor their application to your opening. It can be hard to determine real skill sets from this limited data.
How to fix this:
Create a structured process for testing candidates and verifying their qualifications and experience.
Administering skills tests early in the application process, whether general or job-specific, can help you confidently surface strong candidates for your interview shortlist. A good ATS can automate these tests, saving you even more administrative burden.
Hiring Mistake #6: Asking the wrong interview questions
Another common hiring mistake is asking interview questions that fail to unearth who an applicant really is and what they're capable of.
This often happens due to the interviewer not having a clear understanding of what they need to assess. They fall back on stock questions that the candidate has already prepared for. The interviewer doesn't get the information needed to make a confident hiring decision.
Some questions should never be included in the interview process, as they risk legal action.
How to fix this:
Before interviewing a candidate, know what you need to assess and how you're going to do so. Even if an interview question sounds good on paper, consider what you'll get from asking it. If it doesn't inform your hiring decision, leave it out of the interview.
Personality testing can offer valuable insights into a candidate's character traits and job-related behaviors. You can use the results to create candidate-specific interview questions that are more likely to elicit an honest response.
That kind of candid, nuanced information leads to more informed, confident hiring decisions.
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Hiring Mistake #7: Making biased decisions
To ensure you hire the best candidate for a position, focus on their skills and qualifications rather than superficial factors, such as their age, ethnicity, social class, or similarity to you.
Unfortunately, unconscious bias can still guide recruiting decisions that lead to selection errors in recruitment, limit your team's diversity, and have adverse effects on employee engagement.
Unconscious bias is hard to identify in yourself, making it difficult to limit during the hiring process.
How to fix this:
The most effective way to eliminate unconscious bias is to use data to improve your hiring. With the results of pre-employment testing, you can create data-driven shortlists and make hiring decisions that are less likely to result in turnover.
Hiring Mistake #8: Overlooking the importance of soft skills
A common hiring manager mistake is to focus too much on hard skills and overlook people skills or emotional strengths. These so-called “soft skills” are equally as important as technical skills.
Yet, failing to investigate a candidate's soft skills remains one of the top hiring mistakes that employers make. This error often results in low-quality hires and increased turnover.
How to fix this:
Soft skills may not be as easy to identify as hard skills, but with the help of personality testing, you can get a better understanding of how a candidate thinks and works.
For example, you'll be able to tell:
- Whether they're introverted or extroverted
- If they're better at working independently or on a team
- Their disposition toward problem-solving
- Their communication style
This will help you more accurately predict candidates' on-the-job performance and likelihood of success.
Hiring Mistake #9: Choosing from a small talent pool
Another big hiring mistake is to select candidates from a limited talent pool. In not casting a wider net to find more people, you increase the chances you'll have to settle for a less-than-ideal candidate.
This risks higher turnover, which has a negative financial impact and damages your workplace culture.
How to fix this:
To expand the size, quality, and diversity of your talent pool, broaden your search. Post jobs in a variety of locations, especially those that serve communities of applicants you might not otherwise reach.
You can use job posting websites, networking events, employee referral programs, and your own job board software to boost the exposure of your postings and attract more qualified applicants.
After trying several different places, you'll have a better idea of which ones send you the best candidates.
And don't overlook the most obvious sources of great employees: internal talent. Training and upskilling existing employees and promoting from within lets you fill roles more quickly, boost morale, and retain people with valuable institutional knowledge.
The benefits of avoiding hiring pitfalls
Understanding common hiring mistakes and how to avoid them will help you maintain a productive and stable staff. Investing in hiring process technology, screening, and best practices will benefit your organization through:
- Saved budget: Using automation and organization tools lowers your cost-per-hire while avoiding the expense and waste of bad hires.
- Higher quality of hire: Identifying candidates with the experience, skills, and personality you need helps you make informed, data-driven hiring decisions.
- Better retention and engagement: The right hires stay longer, invest in their role, and contribute to your company's long-term success.
- Stronger team performance and morale: Finding good fits for your culture and teams boosts productivity.
- Reduced compliance risk: Adopting best practices with a consistent and well-documented hiring process reduces the likelihood of bias, discrimination, and legal risk.
- More inclusive and diverse pipeline: Attracting talent from many backgrounds and perspectives drives creativity and innovation.
Your next steps to hire with confidence
Hire Success® pre-employment testing software is a powerful way to reduce bias, compare candidates objectively, and make faster, data-driven hiring decisions. We help you streamline your recruitment process and make confident, well-informed choices.
