This isn’t an article to skip, especially not when it’s titled recruitment mistakes to avoid and that’s because high-quality recruitment is about more than just sending CVs and getting people into a client’s inbox. It’s about helping clients engage and onboard candidates successfully with a detailed and strategic approach to candidate qualification.
Get it wrong, and time and money leak through an agency’s processes.
Get it right, and consistent billing and reliable revenue follow.
Understanding Candidates is Crucial
The level of understanding a recruiter has of their candidates is often overlooked as a meaningful differentiator from the competition. Most recruiters think of ‘differentiators’ in terms of brand, pricing, resources or infrastructure.
On a personal level, they may consider market knowledge as a factor – how well they know their space, the companies, and the trends within it.
But they might not think about the relationships they have with each individual candidate – a ‘USP’ that’s unique to each and every recruitment process.
The Importance of Qualifying Candidates
Recruiters who learn the art of expertly qualifying and understanding candidates for each role or process build a sizable advantage over their competitors and add major value for their customers.
But correctly qualifying candidates for roles isn’t easy.
A lot of recruitment training places the emphasis on template-based interrogation of the candidate, focused heavily on vetting for hard skills in an assessment-style approach. While this ticks some important boxes, it leaves other critically essential areas untouched.
And getting candidate qualification right is as much about knowing what to avoid as it is about knowing where to concentrate.
3 Recruitment Mistakes to Avoid
Here are the three biggest mistakes recruiters make and why they’re so costly.
Unconscious Bias
Unconscious bias can kick in really quickly when looking at a CV or a LinkedIn profile. Often recruiters decide after a glance that a candidate is ‘perfect’ for what they’re looking for, and this can negatively impact the rest of the process – even if the candidate genuinely is a strong match.
By deciding preemptively that a candidate is a great fit, recruiters can slip up by spending less time than usual with them in initial qualifying calls – skipping over important vetting questions or leaving the candidate not feeling sufficiently invested to commit fully to the role.
What’s not covered early on due to a rush of enthusiasm (other interviews the candidate may have, notice periods, family situation, relocation etc.) can come back to haunt recruiters later down the line.
Not digging into true motivation
Understanding candidate motivation is commonly understood as ‘what someone wants.’ Better phrased, it’s about why they want what they want.
Knowing that a candidate wants a pay rise, for instance, with no knowledge of their circumstances, life goals, financial situation etc. is borderline useless information when working with that candidate throughout an interview process.
Understanding, instead, what that raise would mean for them, their ambitions or their family, adds vital context that hugely increases the depth of connection in subsequent conversations.
Ignoring early warning signs
Too often, recruiters get excited over a strong-looking CV and put their fingers in their ears when something starts alerting them that the process is at risk of collapse.
Candidates agreed reluctantly to having their CVs submitted, being slow in their responses, and not replying to emails or calls– all basic signals of a lack of commitment, which plenty of recruiters are happy to ignore in blind pursuit of hitting activity KPIs.
An increased level of discipline helps recruiters separate emotion and enthusiasm from the reality of the situation, making better decisions and driving better outcomes.
Best Practises when Qualifying Candidates
By re-framing candidate qualification as a true deep-dive process to understand candidates at a more meaningful level, and following a rigid process that doesn’t bend for even the best CV, recruiters gain a valuable new level of control over their operations and can better invest their time where the highest chances of deals are.
Preparing candidates for an interview is about more than just equipping them with information. The right approach helps proactively vet their readiness to interview and transforms consultants from recruiters to personal interview coaches.
Ineffective Candidate Interview Preparation
There are many reasons why candidate interview preparation can be ineffective.
Among others, these include:
Each of these issues can create serious problems later on in the process – although recruiters can check off ‘interview prep’ on their workflows, they haven’t necessarily increased their chances of making a placement. In some cases, they may have made them worse.
Perfecting the Candidate Interview Process
At its core, an interview is flawed before it even starts. It’s flawed as a concept. Why?
Because an interview doesn’t actually give someone the chance to show they are the best for the role, it gives them an opportunity to describe or articulate why they’re the best.
What this means for recruiters is simple – they need to coach and enable candidates to articulate their suitability.
For many candidates, this won’t come naturally and it won’t be obvious how to do it. Recruiters will need to work with them to help them highlight experience, quantify achievements and better showcase their abilities.
But it’s also important for candidates to show clients the match between their profiles and what the client is looking for.
Recruiters who fail to specifically prepare their candidates in this area are leaving too much to luck – knowing what the client wants and what the candidate has to offer, but trusting that the client independently will make that link.
Coaching candidates to not just articulate their suitability but explicitly match their profile with client needs dramatically increases the chances of a successful interview, as well as consolidating the sense of a mutual fit on the candidate’s side.
Optimising the Interview Process
Great interview preparation isn’t about recruiters sharing their information with the candidate.
It’s about allowing or giving candidates the space to show what they’re prepared already, and helping them to improve.
By bombarding candidates with ‘insight’ and failing to assess their readiness or how they present their suitability or differentiators, recruiters have no way of gauging how likely their candidates are to perform strongly in interviews.
Consequently, they’ve got little to no insight into their own deal pipeline and future revenue. Making the jump from recruiter to coach might feel daunting to some, but with the right foundations, it’s a game-changer for consultants operating at every level.
TL;DR Key Takeaways
- Understanding a recruiter’s candidates is often overlooked, but it’s a significant differentiator from the competition.
- Qualifying candidates for each recruitment process builds a significant advantage and adds major value for recruiters’ customers.
- Unconscious bias, not digging into true motivation, and ignoring early warning signs are the three biggest mistakes recruiters make and are costly.
- Best practices for recruiters to qualify candidates include reframing candidate qualification as a deep-dive process, preparing candidates for an interview, and transforming consultants from recruiters to personal interview coaches.
- Ineffective candidate interview preparation can create serious problems later on in the process, while perfecting the candidate interview process involves coaching and enabling candidates to articulate their suitability.
