Skills gaps and talent scarcity continue to plague HR professionals across the country. Finding a diamond in the rough during your hiring process can feel like a godsend, but what if they just don’t work out? We see this a lot at Talentlab. The main culprit is that companies lack a well-structured and robust hiring process. Hiring managers and their teams make simple mistakes that are ultimately killing their ability to attract, hire, and retain the top talent they need to sustain and grow their organizations.
If you are going to compete with other companies and acquire top tech talent, you need to ensure your hiring process is as fine-tuned as possible. To help you do this, we have put together a list of the top seven hiring mistakes we see hiring managers continue to make as they are trying to attract and hire top performers within the tech field.
Common Mistake #1: Unclear Role Requirements
A hiring team that doesn’t have a clear idea of its ideal candidate can lead to disastrous hiring outcomes. Having clear and comprehensive requirements for any role that you’re looking to fill in your company is crucial to your ability to not only hire the right candidate at the end of your overall process, but also attract the right pool of qualified candidates right from the beginning.
77% of Canadian employers report significant challenges in finding qualified workers, indicating a persistent skills gap that underscores the necessity for clear and precise job descriptions.
Cutting Corners
Hiring can be very time-consuming, and most hiring managers and their teams dread the idea of spending more time than necessary for any given hire. It’s common for them to seek the path that will get them their new hire as quickly as possible. However, this can often lead to rushing into in-person interviews without establishing proper role requirements and vetting candidates through their resumes and phone interviews beforehand.
Imagine if we applied this logic to other business processes:
- Can you imagine starting to work on a client’s project without gathering any requirements?
- Or pushing a product to market without researching if there is a demographic interested in buying it?
We see how illogical it is to commit our business’s time and money to poorly thought-out business ventures, but for some reason, the same logic isn’t always applied to hiring.
Top candidates are available for only 10 days before getting hired, emphasizing the need for a streamlined and efficient interview process to secure top talent promptly.
The Solution
Ask some tough questions, plain and simple. Your first step in any hiring process should be to:
- Review the skills the job requires
- Understand the previous experience required
- Identify the personality type that would set up the candidate for success in the role
Make sure all involved decision makers are in agreement on the information to ensure there are no areas of uncertainty as you are reviewing potential candidates.
If possible, discuss the role requirements with existing employees. Often, leaders might not be aware of what it’s like to actually perform in the role they are hiring for, or the more tactical duties that will be required. It’s a good reason to do exit interviews, but in a pinch, talking to peers who will work alongside the new hire will help get the full picture of what is really needed to succeed.
Establishing Key Expectations
Develop a list of key expectations and milestones that the new hire should achieve within the first 6-12 months. This will allow you to further vet the candidates in front of you while also allowing you to measure the new hire’s success as they progress in the role.
Data Needs Human Oversight
One key issue that often creates a false sense of a clear vision is that the hiring team avoids using data in their initial role requirements discussion. Data can help break through assumptions and correct a search before it gets off the rails. However, it’s important to keep a balanced approach. Relying strictly on data can cause the process to become too rigid and cause equally impactful hiring problems.
Discuss the data with everyone involved, but don’t forget that hiring is often about a personal match between the candidate and the hiring manager. Even if the data shows a quality candidate is a perfect fit, if the hiring manager doesn’t feel they could lead the candidate effectively, forcing the hire based on data will only create a tense situation and affect morale.
Common Mistake #2: Interviewing Too Many Candidates
Our logic tells us that the more candidates we see, the more likely we are to find the one we’re looking for, right? This is far from the truth. The average interview process takes 7 weeks according to Indeed, but that’s just an estimate. If you’re going after top talent, it’s worth noting that they’re looking at your organization as an option for their next career move alongside other organizations. Therefore, the longer your interview process, the stronger the chance you will miss out on the right candidate who could have a real impact on your company.
Check Mistake #1
Confidence in a hire can be challenging, and many hiring managers believe that reviewing more candidates will help them feel more confident about a hire, and in turn, avoid making a bad hire. However, if you’re interviewing over a dozen candidates or more, it can be an indication that you’re struggling with the first mistake we raised in this article, which is being unclear about the role requirements.
If you’re not able to interview a candidate and decide whether or not they’re a good fit, you may need to take a step back and make sure you know what you’re looking for.
Limit Your Initial Interviews
Interviewing the first person who applies and then meeting a couple more is useful. However, interviewing 27 candidates and feeling like you might need to meet ten more is a clear sign that you have taken the idea of options too far. Similar to a wedding dress, there is a limit to how many you need to try before you will confuse yourself.
The Solution
Interview different profiles on the same day or over a short time period, versus interviewing multiple people with similar profiles. Having multiple profiles that are seemingly the same can cause confusion and make you feel like you can’t differentiate between who is stronger than the other. But by mixing up the profiles, you can make clear distinctions as they are fresh in your mind. Ultimately, this strategy will help you better compare gaps and strengths to really make sure you are getting what you need, not just what you want.
Scheduling Interviews
Set a firm number of interviews that you are willing to conduct for the given role. This strategy will not only help you manage your time and quantify the time and effort being put into the hire, but it will also allow you to be more critical when it comes to the people you choose to interview. You will start to make sure that you are only bringing in the people you really want to speak with.
The more senior or key the role, the more interviews you may want to do. The key here is once you hit your target, if you can’t make a confident hire, then you need to change an aspect of the search and start again. Interviewing 20 more of the same after no success is just a waste of time.
Common Mistake #3: Complicated Interview Process
Think about the hiring and interview process from the candidate’s perspective. This is something that hiring managers often overlook, as they are primarily focused on ensuring that the person they choose to hire is the right fit for the company. But the candidate is also in the process of finding out whether or not your company is the right decision for them. It is a two-way street that can often be one-sided, one side being the employer.
60% of job seekers quit an application process because it’s too long or complicated, highlighting the importance of a concise and candidate-friendly interview process.
Setting Expectations
You are going after top performers. You only want the best of the best in your company. This also means that these candidates expect the best from you. And that means, right from the beginning. The application and interview process is their first impression of your company. This is your first opportunity to show them why they should join your organization and what kind of experiences they can expect if they decide to join.
Technical Test Pitfalls
For many in tech, recruiting processes include some sort of testing to ensure the candidate is up to snuff when it comes to what they’ll be working on daily. Yet, time and time again, hiring managers create technical tests with no relevance to the work that candidates will be doing.
No software development work is done in a vacuum, so creating an academic coding test or stressful whiteboarding session will test the memory of candidates, but not their capability in a real-world environment where the work will be performed.
These technical tests have largely been debunked as being inconsistent and not a real indicator of performance. They don’t take into account attributes like soft skills, and instead fuel stressful scenarios without real applications.
If your interview process is complicated and drawn out, job seekers will associate these qualities with your company. It’ll cause them to think about what their days will look like, what kind of leadership they’ll experience, what kind of red tape they’ll have to navigate to get things done, and so much more.
“The hiring process has been breaking down for twenty years, but the pace of its devolution has been picking up lately. More and more employers are adopting pointless, expensive and time-consuming extra processes to make their recruiting pipelines even slower and more off-putting to candidates. They don’t realize that they are actively driving talented people into the arms of their competitors.”
Liz Ryan, Founder and CEO of Human Workplace
The Solution
Understand that the interview process is a two-way street and treat it as such. While you are interested in this candidate, who is most likely in high demand, they are interested in you. While you are vetting them, they are doing the same. This is a mutual interaction to discover whether or not the two of you are a good fit. By creating this two-way street between you and the candidate, you show them that you value their time and you are dedicated to finding out whether or not it’s going to be a good fit for the both of you.
Simplify Your Interview Process
- 1. Go through all of the steps your interview process has, and if there is anything that doesn’t 100% need to happen, chop it.
- 2. Keep the crucial parts that help you and your team interview a candidate and get rid of the rest.
- a. This could mean that you eliminate an online questionnaire altogether (or shorten it), remove one interviewer altogether (perhaps an interview that is done by a decision maker that won’t be interacting with this new hire), and perhaps you even provide the candidate a roadmap of what the interview process will look like.
- 3. When it comes to testing, consider swapping outdated testing for ‘work sample tests’, which companies like Google have been championing.
- a. The key here is to give candidates a chance to demonstrate capabilities that will directly affect the chances of success in the role.
- 4. Combining assessment techniques is more effective than using any single method.
- a. Choose a mix of evaluations that make sense for your needs, and don’t be afraid to ditch outdated testing approaches.
At the end of the day, if you can’t remember all the steps in your interview process, or the steps aren’t helping make better hires, it’s too complicated. Simplify it as much as possible so you can maintain the attention and momentum of the candidates you have in play.
Common Mistake #4: Too Many Decision Makers
As the saying goes, “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” This implies that too many decision-makers will inevitably lead to failure, and that couldn’t be more true than in hiring. Having too many decision-makers in your hiring process will cause bottlenecks, like:
- Slowing down the overall process due to the number of hands in the pot
- Added confusion to the candidate
- Additional opinions and biases that make it difficult to come to a decision
The key to a successful hiring process is to involve only the most crucial people. Any more than that and the process becomes convoluted and starts to break down. It’s common for companies to have more decision-makers involved in the hiring process, as people often want to be involved. However, every decision maker needs to serve a purpose; if they don’t, there is no need for them to be involved.
Hiring by Committee: Is it realistic to find a candidate that would please even two of these hiring managers? What about all 6?
The Solution
According to Glassdoor, you should involve the following parties in your internal recruiting process:
- The hiring manager
- Top performers from the team the new hire will be working with
- The new hire’s direct manager
Keep your hiring team to these key players and these key players only. We have also seen both good and bad aspects of including peers in interviews. It’s important that if peers are involved, they have been trained in interview best practices.
Ensure that the hiring team has had an open and frank discussion about the role’s requirements, and they have agreed on a unified profile. Everyone has to be on the same page. Bonus points if you can agree on what indicators you are looking for. (ie. When we say ‘intelligence’ what are some of the indicators candidates can provide that we want to see). The larger the hiring team, the less likely you are to reach a consensus about the same person. Set realistic expectations, and be happy with a majority.
Common Mistake #5: Lack of Defined Culture
The most common reasons a hire goes bad are that neither the hiring manager nor the candidate really knows what they expect out of the arrangement. This goes back to some of the other common hiring mistakes we’ve raised, such as:
- Mistake #1: Unclear role requirements
- Mistake #3: Complicated interview process
- Mistake #6: No onboarding process
Without having these areas completely clear and laid out, you will be unable to outline what is expected of the candidate should they be chosen for the position.
Think Like a Candidate
Top performers are looking for their next career moves. They make these decisions strategically and want to know, without a doubt, that when they make their next move, they will be successful in their new role. They will want to know things like:
- Their responsibilities
- How to measure their success
- How other people are performing
- What the compensation and bonus structures are like
- What kind of company culture you have
- Any challenges you see happening during their first few weeks and months
- Any other information that would directly impact whether or not they’re successful in the new role
If you are unclear about this information, particularly around culture, you are at a high risk of making a bad hire. This is simply because you have missed the opportunity to provide this top performer with the information they need to assess their own potential for success.
As previously stated, top talent won’t accept roles they know they won’t be successful in. Therefore, without providing the information needed to judge success probability, you may hire them into a role they could have told you wasn’t for them.
The Solution
Talk to the team, manager, and current employee in the role (if it’s a replacement), and flesh out the day-to-day duties and job scope. Spend some time during the final interview with the candidate to review quantifiable goals for the first six months to make sure the candidate is up to the challenge. They will tell you whether or not they are.
Highlight the Company Culture
Discuss both the positives and negatives of the corporate culture that has developed over time.
- Start-ups often have fun, casual environments, but can require candidates to be comfortable owning larger and less linear job scopes.
- Larger companies might provide more linear roles, but have more bureaucracy to contend with.
Understanding both your culture’s selling points and warts will help you be able to set honest expectations for candidates.
Bring up some of the potential challenges that the new hire will face and encourage them to be honest about whether they can handle those challenges. It’s also crucial to mention the kind of support they will receive in the event of these challenges.
Finally, ask thoughtful questions that are directly related to the skills that you feel are needed for the right person.
Common Mistake #6: No Onboarding Process
So, you’ve hired your top performer, and they’re ready to be onboarded. Do you have a structured system in place to do that? If not, you could be putting your company at risk of damage to the overall employer brand. This reputation damage could, in turn, impact your ability to attract top-performing talent in the future.
Recruiting and Onboarding Go Hand-in-hand
The big mistake we see people make is thinking that once the contracts are signed and they have someone locked into an employment agreement, their job is done. This is incorrect. The job has only just begun. Onboarding becomes the process that makes or breaks a new employee’s ability to succeed in their role.
Many onboarding programs are just orientation in disguise, but in reality, orientation isn’t a real substitute. Onboarding should cover the candidate’s experience in a holistic approach, and not just touch on tactical issues like what to do in a fire alarm. HBR notes that organizations with a structured onboarding process have 50% greater retention of new hires. Onboarding approaches should be carefully considered, and goals should be measured to ensure that onboarding can evolve as needed.
Setting Expectations (Again)
During the recruiting process, you and the candidate discussed the role and all of the expectations. The onboarding process is where you now put all of those aspects into action. Without an action plan, there is no clear direction for the new hire, which automatically decreases productivity and, ultimately, causes them to quickly exit your company.
The Solution
When thinking about your onboarding process, consider whether your team is applying the same consideration to other recruitment process initiatives. More than half of businesses don’t measure the success of their onboarding programs. Revamp your onboarding process by:
- Starting to keep data, including surveys from new hires
- Developing metrics to measure the effectiveness
Onboarding is more than the first-day orientation. When developing an onboarding program, consider including:
- Mentorship planning
- Assessment of future training needs
- Online or self-paced training resources
- Introductions with key leaders across the company
Avoid hokey ideas like forcing employees to take new hires out for lunch or show them around the office. Instead, consider asking employees to volunteer to rotate welcome duties. Create a ‘welcome team’ that is aware of the onboarding program, its goals, and genuinely excited to help onboard new team members. Do the same for mentorships, and don’t be afraid to pair new hires with leaders from different business units. The true indicator of success will be the engagement, and the more you mandate current employees to participate, the more likely the experience will be negative for a new hire.
Common Mistake #7: Not Keeping Candidates In Mind For Future Hires
You will always have roles to fill. There will never come a point where you don’t have use for top talent. That’s why it’s so important to remember that you need to be looking at all the candidates who apply and come in for interviews as opportunities for hire down the road. This is known as building a talent community.
What is a Talent Community?
Essentially, it is a system that employers use to build a pipeline of prospective candidates for future recruitment. It’s essentially a sales pipeline, but for candidates.
It’s common for hiring managers to look at resumes, bring in the people they want to interview, hire one person, and then put the resumes into a filing cabinet. Let’s be honest, those resumes will probably never be looked at again.
However, what you need to keep in mind is that these candidates:
- Know your company
- Have already shown interest
- Might be interested if another role becomes available down the road
By not taking the time to nurture and cultivate these candidates, who would be compared to hot leads, you are wasting a ton of time on having to go out and find new candidates, put them through the application process, interview them, etc. Your entire hiring process could be expedited because you and these existing, quality candidates are already familiar with one another.
The Solution
Stay in touch with past candidates. Building a talent community around candidates who could be future hires is relatively straightforward. Start by sending them email updates through a monthly newsletter to inform them about upcoming roles and events, or to provide them with tips on interviewing for new roles. The goal is to be a resource for them on all things employment.
If you have an Application Tracking System (ATS), make sure all your candidates are signed up through the portal. That way, they will receive notifications when new roles become available. Don’t wait until you need a talent community to care about it. The real secret to success is that your investment must be authentic and without obvious self-interest.
Stop Killing Your Hiring Strategy
At the end of the day, you could have the best hiring strategy possible, but if you’re making even one of these common hiring mistakes we’ve explained above, your plan is not going to perform as well as it could.
While some of these mistakes may seem simple to avoid, they have a massive impact on your ability to show top performers that making a move to your company is in their career’s best interest. With talent being one of the top challenges for businesses today, you need to be doing everything you can to put your best foot forward from a hiring perspective.
When we look at the roles within technology, it doesn’t matter what industry you are in; you will always rely on people with software skills and IT to ensure your company is running smoothly. They simply possess a particular set of skills and knowledge that are required in today’s day and age of business. Need help finding these quality candidates? Connect with us.