Jobhop Jobhop's blog : 7 Recruiting Mistakes Employers Make Over and Over Again

Why Do Employers Keep Making The Same Recruiting Mistakes?

“We always struggle to get good employees” OR “It takes forever to fill our positions”, this is heard regularly up and down the country on a daily basis. When you ask about their recruiting methods they’ve probably done it in the same way for years, when you ask what have they done differently to get different results, and you get the blank stare!

The definition of madness is repeating the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, when will people realise that to get different results, change must happen?

Here are 7 recruiting mistakes that employers keep making

The “Job Advert.”

The same job advert for that same job position gets touted on the job boards time after time. When people keep seeing it, they come to the conclusion that the company can’t keep its employees or the vacancy can never be filled because it’s an awful place to work at.

If someone does read the advert, they’re not instantly attracted to the job, because, putting it mildly the advert is boring. The job advert is all one sided, listing everything the company expects, it probably reads like a shopping list, and then you’re told to apply with your CV to the recruitment officer ( sounds scary) by a certain deadline. Some of these job adverts end with the sentence “If you don’t hear back from us then your application has been unsuccessful! After reading the boring job advert, getting a CV organised and applying to the scary recruitment officer, he or she hasn’t even got the decency to get back to you to let you know why the application wasn’t successful. Word soon gets out about company employer brands, respect is a two-way thing.

If companies want to attract great candidates with a job advert, then they shouldn’t use the statutory template, chuck that in the bin! The recruitment department and the marketing department should get their heads together and come up with something that will get potential candidates excited. Never, ever finish the advert with, “If you don’t hear from us then your job application hasn’t been successful” if you do then you don’t deserve to have anyone apply for it!

The CV

Seriously! We are in the age of technology where people have online profiles, interactive personal pages, Slideshare presentations of their job journey, but companies still ask for a CV to be emailed or worse posted! to the recruitment officer! Every second there are approximately 7,230 tweets made, 8,800 Snapchat photos are shared, 54,593 Google searches, 124,077 Youtube videos watched and 2,495,725 emails, we live in a world of smart technology. Where there’s smart there’s always the not-so-smart, meet the dummy employer. They insist on having a CV; the smart candidate knows they won't bother because they’ve just had 7 offers from Linkedin and Jobhop. The dummy employer wonders why the CVs they get are low quality, HelloOOO; it’s because they’re not from the ones getting snapped up online by smart companies. Employers who still rely on old fashioned, slow methods will lose out.

The Career page

Or should I say the non-existent career page? How can potential candidates find out more about the company, the people who work there and the types of jobs on offer, when there’s not even a career page to go to? There are some companies who will say they have one of those, but what they have is just a page which says Jobs, followed by there are currently no vacancies, that’s not a career page! Just like a consumer researches products and services, a candidate will research careers and companies, and a good starting point is going to the company career page. If the start is rocky, then people will expect the ending to be even worse!

The Barriers

Why does it have to be so hard to talk to anyone at a company? A potential candidate might want to ask some questions, because when they leave university, your company could be a consideration. The contact page on the website is just a long page asking for hundreds of personal details; the candidate only wanted to ask one quick question.

The candidate tries to find links to social media so that they can tweet you, but there isn’t any. They resort to calling but are met by a receptionist who puts them on hold for twenty minutes to listen to Green Sleeves. When the receptionist finally comes back, they say they couldn’t find anyone available so it’s probably best to email the recruiting officer!

The lack of community

Many companies constantly fire-fight, going full out in panic mode when a position needs to be filled. It doesn’t have to be like that, when a company gets into the mindset of building a community then there’s always great people to cherry pick from when the time arises, as well as that, your community works for you to spread the message. All it takes is strategic, forward thinking,and some time and attention.

The interview

I’ve already covered ”the stupid interview” in an earlier blog post, so I’ll keep this short.

Interviews can be nerve wrecking, and because you should want the candidate relaxed so they can present themselves in the best way, then it makes sense to help them feel at ease. So, why in most cases that don't happen? Employers make the mistake of not being transparent with the interview process and making it more difficult than it needs to be. Some employers create a very uncomfortable experience for the candidate, by making sure that there is a huge table to divide them, having three or more people grill them and sometimes asking candidates to act for them in role plays!

The ghosting

Then after all the hoops candidates have to jump through, they’re told “We’ll let you know” The candidate waits and waits, and guess what, the employer just disappears! You’d think an employer would never behave like that, but it happens too often. Research by CV-Library found that 52.7 per cent of UK workers were ghosted by employers following the interview.

With employers constantly making mistakes like these, there’s no wonder they’re struggling to recruit good employees.

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