5 Top Recruiting Mistakes Startups and Businesses Are Making

Can you relate to the title of this article?

You want to make your next hire, so you:

• Put together a job description
• Place your job advertisement at strategic locations
• Interviewed potential hires
• Employed one of them

And boom, a few months into the job, you suddenly realize this person is not the right fit for your business. Worse still, this new hire is performing badly on the role.

This experience is why this article is important.

We see this happen all the time. Recruiting Managers and businesses are finding it increasingly hard to hire the best talent that can take their business to the next level. And as we all probably know, human capital is the most important factor to consider when growing and scaling any business.

Most startups fail to grow because they either place low value on human capital or simply fail to recruit the right person to the right role.

Because of the challenges mentioned above, we will be taking a look at today‘s current recruitment process, identifying some key mistakes businesses and recruiting managers are making, and looking at easy fixes you can start doing today to avoid repeating this same mistake in your business or hiring process.

That said, here are 5 of the most common recruiting mistakes startups and businesses make:

See Also: 5 Things You Must Know Before Hiring Someone Smarter Than You

1) Having an Unclear Job Description:

Problem: 

One of the most critical mistakes most organizations make is failing to define the job before beginning an employee search. Being misleading or unclear about the job can cause you to hire the wrong candidate.

Solution:

Before you begin the hiring process, consider the things that would attract you to a job and implement them into your own business. Make a list of the job responsibilities and a corresponding list of the skills, knowledge, experience, and talent the person needs to have in order to do these tasks to your expectations. By having a clear idea of what you need, it is easier to see those skills in candidates.

See Also: 3 Hires That Can Make Your Small Business Revenues Explode

2) Recruitment Politics:

Problem:

Research and experience have repeatedly shown that politics is a regular feature in the Nigerian recruitment exercise. The effects of the exercise have been identified as a cause of most organization deficiencies, which includes but are not limited to corruption, inefficiency, low productivity, indiscipline, and much more.

Solution:

Any recruitment and selection process not based on merit should be avoided. Recruitment and selection exercises should be credibly handled by experts; hence, organizations should be composed of experts in human resource management.

3) An absence of Hiring Policies:

Problem:

It is shocking to observe that a lot of organizations fail to define their hiring policies before beginning an employee search. An unclear policy can confuse the hiring manager and candidates at best, or invite legal troubles at worst; especially when it comes to contract workers and exempt versus non-exempt employees.

Solution:

If you want your business to grow, you must have a recruitment and selection policy.  If the recruitment and selection policies are well designed, they would stand the test of time. Bringing in transparency and professionalism is always a good thing. So this type of policy is always a great addition.

See Also: 5 Things You Must Know Before Hiring Someone Smarter Than You

4) Trusting the First Impression:

Problem:

Recruiters frequently judge candidates on whether or not they like them, as opposed to matching their strengths with the responsibilities of the position.

Solution:

Hiring managers should actually try to disprove their initial impression. You can’t know for sure how a new employee will perform once hired, but you can mitigate the risk of a bad hire by not factoring first impressions into your decision.

5) Unprofessional Recruiters:

Problem:

In various organizations today, workers with fewer skills or little assignments to perform in an organization are transferred to the human resources department without any issues or thorough process. This argument may sound bizarre but it’s the truth. The implication of having an unprofessional Human Resource Professional produces recruitment errors that reduce business competitiveness and corporate profit.

Solution:

Seek to partner with a reliable recruitment agency to work with you during the hiring process or simply outsource to a human resource management company.

See Also: New Entrepreneurs Will Regret 8 Things: Here’s How To Avoid Them

About The Writer

This is a guest blog post submitted by Ogugua Belonwu. He is the founder of MyJobMag, a leading online job portal in Nigeria.

Note: This article has been edited for style and substance.

If you’ll like to submit guest blog posts like this to startuptipsdaily.com, please read the guidelines listed here.

What are your thoughts on these 5 top recruitment mistakes startups and businesses are making? Let me know by leaving a comment below.