Having only the most qualified employees join your organization often entails going all out in your recruitment process. This means investing a lot on different methods of advertising your job opening. It also implies spending more time and money to strictly screen all applicants to ensure you will only add the top talent in your employee roster.
However, being too methodical and careful in searching could cause you to make hiring mistakes that can cost your company a fortune. If you keep sticking to strategies that are not exactly helping you attract, screen, and select the best applicants, you will waste a lot of your time, money, and other valuable resources.
Wasteful Recruitment Practices and Tactics
Certain hiring strategies and practices will cause your organization to lose out on recruiting the best employees. More importantly, you will end up losing money and time whenever you use them — resources that would have been better utilized in other areas or operations of your business.
The top recruitment consultants in the UAE list below the most wasteful recruitment tactics and practices which you should start avoiding now:
1. Creating poor job descriptions
Your job description is the first point of contact between your applicants and your company. If you want to attract only the most qualified candidates at this early stage of the recruitment process, without going over the budget for your job advertising campaign, you need to work on having concise, clear, and engaging job descriptions.
Poor job descriptions state only the traits and skills you are looking for in your desired candidates. On the other hand, an excellent one will describe the role in terms of its overall purpose. It will have a list of critical areas of responsibility as well.
If you are looking to update your job descriptions, try using performance-based job ones. This type states the specific responsibilities that applicants will take on as well as what comprises success for the role.
With this strategy, you will discourage applicants who are not qualified for the role and at the same time, attract those who consider the tasks and goals as challenges.
2. Manually screening candidates
Selecting a handful of candidates from the hundreds of applications you will receive will cause you to waste a lot of time and money. After all, you will have to go over numerous CVs thoroughly to find the ones worth including in your shortlisted applicants.
If you hire new employees regularly, it is worth investing in an applicant tracking system or screening app. These types of technology will significantly expedite your hiring process.
With the right recruitment software, you won’t have to w aste your time combing over every application you receive. The system will automatically weed out unqualified candidates from the time you received them. You can then devote more of your time to the best possible applicants.
3. Putting too much stock on interviews
In case you only use interviews to evaluate your top applicants, you are merely squandering a lot of valuable resources shortlisting your candidates. This is because you (or the others conducting it) will end up spending most of the time confirming all the first impressions you have of each candidate.
Additionally, during an interview, many candidates typically say or do anything to get the job. As such, at this stage, you should take the answers of your applicants with a grain of salt.
Although interviews are crucial elements of the hiring process and should never be skipped, you must not rely too much on them. If you want to get a clear idea and evaluation of your shortlisted candidates, it is best to give them a suitable test or exercise to find out how they may perform “on the job.”
In case you decide to include this in your recruitment process, make sure you choose relevant tasks – ones that will allow you to gauge the specific skills and expertise you are looking for. For example, if you are looking to fill in sales and marketing jobs in Dubai, give your applicants an exercise on for creating sample ads or social media campaigns.
4. Interviewing all applicants you think are qualified
Receiving a lot of applications from qualified candidates is a good sign that your recruitment campaign is off to a good start. Although this means that you will have a better chance of hiring the best fit for your company, it doesn’t mean you should invite all of them for an interview.
Doing so will only cause you to waste valuable time and resources – things that can be devoted to running or improving other areas of operations.
This is because the more applicants you talk to, the harder it will be to remember what each one said and what kind of impression they left.
To ensure you won’t spend too much time on the interview stage, invite only the applicants who passed the job performance test you conducted.
5. Failing to consider hiring from within
Finally, if you really want to save money and skip a lot of hassles when recruiting new employees, think about hiring from within your current team.
By taking the time to look at the qualifications of your present employees, you won’t go through the time-consuming and potentially costly recruitment process. Additionally, you will avoid the challenges of hiring applicants who may turn out to be a good fit for your company in the long run.
You will give them the opportunity to elevate their careers as well. Since you already know the capabilities and work ethics of your employees, it is a smart idea to consider promoting from within.
Getting help when you really need to hire additional staff quickly is a cost-efficient, wise move as well. As long as you choose a reliable recruitment consultant to work with, you will save money and time on finding the right candidate to employ.
AUTHOR BIO
David Mackenzie, a recruitment professional with over 20 years’ experience in the field and a record of entrepreneurial accomplishment, is Managing Director and Head of HR at Mackenzie Jones. As the Group MD, David is responsible for the overall direction of the Mackenzie Jones Group, including Mackenzie Jones, MumsAtWork, MENA Solutions, Simply Digital and ThinkTech.
