Startup recruitment agencies, your recruitment game needs to be on point! No startup agency can afford to be making mistakes which cause them to lose candidates or place them in positions they are not well suited for. The knowledge, skill, effective procedure and analysis needs to be in place from day one and only improve as you move forward in order to avoid making some of the most common mistakes. So in light of getting it right the first time around, our partners New Millennia Group Limited, share the top 10 mistakes that recruitment agencies make when recruiting candidates?
1) Failure To Clarify
When advertising the vacancy, are you being crystal clear about the job, what it entails and what your client is looking for? With an inaccurate job description, you’re opening yourself to attracting unsuitable candidates and increasing the workload as you interview and rule out all unsuitable applications and interviewees before discovering your shortlist.
2) Setting Unrealistic Timelines
Quite often businesses are in a hurry to get their next hire secured, however, it’s worth it in the long term to take a little longer to do this and truly find the best candidate. For recruitment agencies, try expressing this to your clients, assure them that by not rushing the process they stand a better chance of finding the most qualified talent and the best fit for their company.
3) Ineffective Interview Questions
More often than not interview questions can follow a fairly standard script. While some interview questions are quite necessary, are some of them outdated or in fact just rather unhelpful and ready to be removed? Or, rather than removing them, are there some more insightful questions which could be added to the line of questioning and discussion? Ultimately the question is: are you getting what you want out of candidates from the questions and procedure you have in place currently?
4) Allowing For Bias
Bias is a sneaky and unhelpful factor that most of us won’t be aware of, the unconscious bias shown by human individuals is something which much of the recruitment industry is now aware of and attempting to neutralise. Recruitment agencies can engage AI for screening, which can help minimise bias as machines have no preconceptions about skills, experience, background, gender or anything else.
5) Not Seeing The Whole Package
So much comes into play when recruitment agencies are assessing a candidate. It’s not purely about the candidate’s ‘fit’ within the company or their experience, it’s about all of these factors and viewing the candidate as a whole; their attitude, hard skills, soft skills, fit into the company culture, training and enthusiasm and drive. For example, don’t fall into the trap of writing off a sharp and quick learning enthusiastic interviewee with excellent communication skills purely because their experience isn’t as strong as another who shows poor communication and overconfidence in their experience.
6) Waiting For The Perfect Candidate
Does the perfect candidate exist for anyone? Candidates are individuals with different and unique skills, none of which are quite equal and each other, so waiting for the perfect candidate to come along may well be a waste of time. Learning to see the potential in candidates and communicating with your clients to understand the real boundaries that they are working within and how flexible they’re willing to be means you can bring forward the candidates with the most potential to thrive in that company.
7) Using The Overqualified Line
Following on from the previous point, when searching for the best possible talent it doesn’t seem logical to turn away candidates for being too qualified! Today more and more of us want to change careers and have aspirations above aggressively climbing the career ladder so a seemingly overqualified candidate may well be more passionate about a role which offers them different opportunities and be eager to learn too!
8) Poor Candidate Notes
Not taking sufficient notes during an interview means that when making decisions, you may have a candidate who you remember as impressive but can’t quite remember why or forget a vital piece of information as to why a candidate would not be suitable for the position when their CV was the strongest. Memory only goes so far; have a pre-made template for your notes and a clear notebook or document so that you miss nothing and you can make extra notes too.
9) Not Following Up
The recruitment process can be a long one depending on the position, the candidate pool and the company’s urgency. By the time you’re ready to make the offer, the first candidate you have screened or interviewed may have undergone many more interviews and with other businesses. Don’t lose your strongest candidates by not bothering to follow up after the interview. Keep the contact with a call or an email soon after the interview and keep your opportunity at the forefront of their mind.
10) Supply feedback
Even the unsuccessful candidates can benefit from a little follow up, these candidates maybe didn’t quite make it to number one this time, but for other clients or future positions, they could be ideal. Follow up with genuine and helpful feedback; if there was something to be improved then they may take this feedback on to improve for next time, and if it just wasn’t to be this time, making contact and letting them know you were impressed and will be in touch for future positions is just good practice.
New Millennia Group Limited offer the only true, fully insured, non-recourse, non-retention 100% funding facility in the market today. New Millennia Group Limited’s finance facilities have been used successfully since May 2000 by recruitment businesses just like yours. New Millennia Group Limited reviews every business’ needs case by case to help them grow as much as possible.
Contact details: Paul O’Rourke, porourke@nmgroup.co.uk, 0161 337 9882
