6 habits of highly ineffective recruiters
It’s no secret that great people power the best companies. And the greatest people are found through hiring that is deliberate and impactful. To achieve successful hiring outcomes, a recruiter should take note of the following habits to avoid;
- Failure to plan
From assessing the hiring needs of the organization to the screening processes, we’ve highlighted how great hiring teams are proactive in planning each step & every candidate or hiring manager interaction. You can’t just wing hiring even though some leaders have acquired a knack for identifying great talent even at a coffee shop or networking event. If you don’t organize your priorities, team & collaborators, spaces, and steps, this will not only lead to terrible outcomes every time but will also lead to bad candidate experiences. Disorganization is a recipe for chaos. A simple example is not booking interview rooms on time and ending up keeping hiring managers & candidates waiting for even hours. Organization is an essential skill for every professional to achieve the most with minimum effort. While unexpected factors may affect your hiring goals such as what we’ve seen this year with COVID-19, plan as much as you can. There’s no harm in being organized and there’s still much within your control. Use technology to help you plan the day, week, month, or year. A simple Excel sheet tracking hiring progress for open positions can help remind you to send out rejection emails on time. Check out hiring tools & software on platforms like Producthunt or Capterra to find ones that can make you work more efficiently. Some like calendars & task management are even free. Save on time, money & effort by using organizational tools.
If you fail to plan you plan to fail.
2. Lacking reality & the human touch
Human-centered design has become popular in business spaces in this decade for a reason. All our customers & consumers in the hiring process are humans and your recruitment should reflect the same. HR is a human process that involves constant and direct interaction with the people that you’re serving. So whether you’re doing a high-level talent acquisition strategy or crafting a job advertisement, work on how to employ human-centered thinking in your HR process design. Your leaders, as well as candidates, are people with emotions, fears, aspirations, and a language. Learn it and master it. There are several ways to empathize and connect with your users including attending networking events, surveys & feedback, employer branding activities, analytics on your platforms, etc. This also helps avoid making critical assumptions. Get out of the building and be in touch with reality.
“Design thinking is the ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success.
3. No evaluation & tracking
One of the most important steps in designing & hiring is measurement. A great recruiter sets SMART goals and can put in place metrics to measure his/their performance. Accountability is important for any team that wants to improve & learn. For more on this, check out our earlier article on high-performance hiring teams. And this includes tracking how our efforts are impacting the bigger business outcomes, as we see below.
Whatever is not measured cannot be improved.
4. Not thinking ahead
Great hiring is one that’s tied to business results and goals. It’s easy to end up getting caught in the day-to-day rush that is recruitment and forget the bigger goal which is talent acquisition. Every great recruiter & talent lead has one thing in common- they sit at the big table. HR is not only involved in shaping the fate of the company but is critical in helping the organization navigate the ever-changing landscape of business. For you to have more impact & visibility in your recruitment, tie your work and day-to-day life to the bigger goals & problems. You can start on this by checking out the 4Bs that will affect the composition of tomorrow’s organization and tracking the future of work trends. People are at the heart of every competitive advantage a business can have and that’s why strategic HR has become a core skill for HRPs this year. Figure out how to offer value at an operational, tactical & strategic level and change your hiring from transactional to transformational.
- “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” — Jim Collins & Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
5. Lack of collaboration
The most successful companies that excel at hiring know one thing too well. Recruitment is not a one-man show. Whether this is about branding or sourcing, you should never work alone. We’ve discussed this before in the power of the networked alliance. Tap into your current networks, friends & family, former colleagues & employees to partners such as agencies, professional groups, social media, schools & influencers to help you. The goal is to work smarter, not harder. Apart from seeking new ways to fill jobs, work on collaborating better with your other team members in the recruiting team, hiring managers & business leads. This brings us to the last core skill.
“Great things in business are never done by one person.”-Steve Jobs
6. Poor communication skills
A great leader is a great communicator. From strategy planning, and employer branding to interviewing and diversity hiring, email campaigns, every step in the hiring process is bound by communication that fosters action & trust. Communication bounds all the above habits and, without it, nothing else can succeed. It’s also the foundation of successful relationships as seen in the sales process. Work on your communication skills by getting expert training, doing online courses, tapping into the internet & a world of resources. Great communication is timely, accurate, complete, actionable, and concise.
“Relationships cannot grow without the proper amount of communication.”
All in all, every professional should always want to perform at their best & offer the most value they can to their colleagues, society & company. We hope these can serve to kick-start your journey to being a phenomenal recruiter while you look at other things you can still do during this COVID period.
All the best.
Still looking for more? Check out https://medium.com/jobonics/is-your-job-ad-the-weakest-link-in-your-hiring-process-part-2-b6e6a33a21d6
