5 easy-to-fix recruitment mistakes

Widely spread talent acquisition processes incorporate all types of errors, some significant and others less so. A few of these errors are both important and easy to solve. Here is our selection.

After addressing our three fundamental errors, we’re now focusing on some more practical ones. This is our top 5, following the recruitment process from start to finish:

1. One-size-fits-all recruitment.

2. Played-by-ear candidate sourcing.

3. CV screening (or misled pre-filtering).

4. Non-valid interviews and assessments.

5. Poor decision-making.

1. One-size-fits-all recruitment

The first typical error is using the same process for various roles. For example, research shows that mental ability tests have great validity in predicting success for professional-managerial jobs, while they are mediocre at predicting success for completely unskilled jobs. However, there is no need to take this principle to the other extreme and reinvent the wheel every time: having a configurable and modular process and deciding if and how to run each step depending on the specific role and its requirements should be enough in many organisations. For example, it's probably not necessary to test the creativity or ambition for roles focused on repetitive tasks, or to search for passive candidates in sectors where there is a lot of unemployment. In contrast, an extra step might be useful to assess candidates for high-turnover or highly specialised roles. There is a lot of research out there to see if a specific step helps with a type of role or not.

2. Played-by-ear candidate sourcing

Recruitment is selecting the best among the candidates we managed to source. Lazy sourcing, such as simply posting the job using the standard ATS automated feature, often leads to a pool of mismatching people, where even the best selection process won’t find us a good hire. Innovation has taken over this stage of the recruitment process: from AI-powered job descriptions to programmatic ads and inverted job-application processes (organisations applying to candidates). But again, it’s not about going crazy – it's about being smart: making reasonable efforts to be where the potential candidates are. Sometimes sending a few messages to similar profiles in your network asking for referrals or showing up at an event or hackathon will get you more and better candidates than burning dollars in online advertising.

ℹ️ Job descriptions, crucial in this stage, can backfire. For instance, too many requirements and inappropriate or unspecific language might put candidates off. Nowadays, there’s too much written on this topic and SaaS solutions available to get it wrong: a “job description review” stage in the hiring process is simply a must.

3. CV screening (or misled pre-filtering)

This point is controversial, but there are many reasons that make CVs a bad screening tool. First, CV screening generates a lot of false positives (people who seem to fit the opportunity on paper, while they don’t) and false negatives (people that could have fit the opportunity, while a quick CV-read makes us think they don’t). Also, they are an evil source of biases: the layout, the picture, the name, the academic education, and many other components  induce to a lot of automatic thoughts that rarely fit what’s important for the job. Even when used properly, CVs reflect experience, past facts, while it's the future, the potential to fit your opportunity, what matters. Most advanced organisations completely remove this step from their process and replace it for alternative skills-based screening steps (see this cool example). If we don’t want to go that far, we should make sure that the screening process and criteria are clearly defined beforehand to avoid biases from creeping in when running the process.

⚠️ Automated CV screening tools seem to be gaining a lot of market traction. Users that choose to use one of them should first understand how it works. For example, they may simply match keywords, leaving out good candidates that may have used different wording. Also, be aware of our automation bias and don’t take the machine’s conclusion as the ultimate truth.

4. Non-valid interviews and assessments

In a well-known conversation with The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, back then Senior VP of People Operations at Google, said: “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.” Similarly, for quirky questions such as “How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations are in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.” This might be a bit exaggerated, and results may vary in different contexts, but there’s enough evidence that asking the same structure of questions to all candidates clearly beats unstructured interviews and that assessments need to target the needs of the role to be valid. Interviewers should be trained to conduct structured, relevant interviews and assessments should be integrated into the process only if they are relevant for the role and evaluators know how to interpret the results.

ℹ️ Often-used personality assessments do not work well in recruitment. One reason is that people answer what they believe they should answer, instead of what they think. Also, evaluators need to be experts to interpret the assessment results correctly for recruitment purposes.

Additional note: providers of personality tests are normally transparent about how useful their tests are for talent identification and will point you to alternative solutions if they have them (examples here and here).

5. Poor decision-making

Even with the best sourcing and filtering process in place, if the final decision is made with the wrong process, big errors may creep in again. This is an easy one to fix:

• If there’s no rubric or scorecard to decide with a list of relevant criteria, we should get one.

• If one person is making the decision, we should form a panel.

• If blindly accepting your biases and gut feelings, we should flesh them out to see if they are reasonable and contribute to a better decision or not.

We should avoid falling victim to our urgency and take this last step rigorously and analytically.

Recruitment troubleshooting

While recruitment is a complex practice and mastering it requires massive efforts, avoiding some of the most common mistakes is easy enough. It’s crucial to keep our eyes open to detect these in our processes, and then fix them – there’re too many solutions available to keep failing. At hiringvalue, we are big fans of recruitment paradigms (general approaches to talent acquisition) that not only address these easy-to-fix issues but also the fundamental errors that lie behind them. We will focus our next articles on some of the most exciting ones. If you want even more, please subscribe and stay tuned! Feedback, ideas or requests? Please get in touch!

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