Hiring a New Employee? Four Tips to Avoid Some Common Mistakes
Hiring a new employee can often be an overwhelming task. You have to make sure the job description is up to date, that you have the capacity to hire and train, sort through applications, conduct interviews, and make tough hiring decisions. Without having a plan and thinking through some critical steps before beginning the hiring process, you may negatively impact not only the current hiring process, but also future recruitment efforts, sales, and your brand as a whole. Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind to avoid some common mistakes that can have detrimental outcomes.
Communication during the hiring process is often viewed as a reflection of what communication will be like internally.
Make sure you have the capacity to do it right. Jumping into posting a job opening before you have the capacity to follow through quickly with reviewing applications, scheduling interviews and conducting interviews, then onboarding the new employee can be extremely detrimental and costly. For example, say you post a job and receive a lot of applications but don’t have the immediate capacity to review them so you end up waiting a couple months. Now you review the applications, identify the top candidates you would like to interview, and reach out to schedule interviews only to find they have already found employment elsewhere. Now you must decide between interviewing some of the other candidates and settling for someone less qualified or starting the whole process over again. Both options can be costly to the organization. Hiring someone who is less qualified may lead to more money spent on training and lower performance and productivity. Starting the whole process over again results in more time spent reviewing applications that could have been used elsewhere and more time without the additional capacity that the new person will bring. Therefore, it is important to think through your capacity to dedicate the necessary time to the hiring process before you post the position.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Communication during the hiring process is often viewed as a reflection of what communication will be like internally. If the communication is inconsistent during the hiring process, this can serve as a major red flag to applicants that are worried about getting the support they will need during the onboarding process. In many cases, the communication during the hiring process can play a major role in a job seekers choice to accept the position or not when they have other opportunities available to them. In some cases, they may choose to pull their application before they even reach the final stages because the lack of communication was such a strong turn-off. Lack of communication can also be interpreted as rejection or cause extra anxiety and uncertainty for the applicant. When you are competing for top talent, you want to make sure you are doing everything you can to keep the applicant engaged and excited about the opportunity. To do this, you must communicate well.
Treat all applicants like a potential employee or customer. One area that is often forgotten is communication with applicants who are not selected. Hiring managers become so focused on their hiring decision and preparing for onboarding that they forget to return to those who were not selected to let them know their decision. This can leave the applicant with a sour taste and a negative feeling about the company. Even if they were not selected for the position, you want to make sure they feel encouraged to apply again in the future. Also, the feelings that motivated them to apply for the position are the same feelings that could make them a potential customer. You want to ensure that those positive feelings aren’t tarnished through poor communication. Therefore, always make sure you are communicating well with all applicants throughout the hiring process, not just with those who were selected to move forward.
Make your hiring part of your marketing. Similar to the above point, your hiring practices do not take place in a vacuum and can have a major impact on both future sales and recruitment. It is important to make sure the impact is a positive one and not a negative one. Not only do poor hiring practices and poor communication hurt the chances of the applicant becoming a future customer, but how they talk about their experience with others may hurt the chances of them becoming customers as well. I have had colleagues decide they will never work with a company I had applied to after hearing about my experience, as they couldn’t trust that communication would be any better as a customer. As someone who didn’t even try to impact people’s opinions about the company, you can imagine the damage that could be done by someone who is even more disgruntled and outspoken about their negative experience. Also, with the prevalence of technology and websites like Glassdoor where all potential applicants can find reviews about the company and the hiring process, it’s even more crucial that you make sure you don’t give them anything negative to say. Everything you do during the hiring process should positively represent your brand and leave people just as big of fans, if not bigger, as they were when they first applied.
Keeping these four tips in mind will help ensure that your hiring process has a positive impact. If you have any questions about how to improve your hiring process or would like additional support, feel free to reach out!