Have you ever wondered if there was something you could have done different when your candidate turns down an offer, or your hiring authority screens out 100% of the candidates who make it to the final interview?
It’s easy to “blame” Hiring Manager or Candidates, but what could you have done different? Did you really understand what was most important to your candidates and clients? Or did you miss something during your interview or when you were writing the requisition?
In today’s candidate driven market, most recruiters are experiencing more offer-turn downs, counter-offers being accepted and candidate no-shows or no-starts! However, many of these are caused by common recruiting mistakes.
Let’s start out with your interaction with your Hiring Managers. Too often, you are given a requisition and it’s the same one that was utilized when the current employee was hired. However, that person had talents and skills that were eventually used by their Direct Report. This additional information is NOT listed on your requisition. This oversight or mistake will result in all your candidates being screened out in their final interview.
To resolve this, send a copy of your requisition to everyone in the interviewing process and ask for their input. Over 50% of the time our Hiring Managers make major changes to the requisition which greatly adjusts our recruiting efforts. Most revisions are made by the person who would be their direct report.
Another common mistake is not obtaining a specific target date to hire or obtaining interview times. It is impossible to determine your recruiting priorities, unless you understand which requisitions are hot. Timing is critical in the recruiting process. If you recruit too early, you will lose your candidates. If you recruit too late, you will not be able to provide your Hiring Managers with results.
When you request interview times, you learn when your Hiring Managers are available to interview. We once had a Hiring Manager ask us to fill a senior level position and he needed to person to start the job, before the end of the year. When we requested interview times he call back the next day and gave us January 7th. He said on one was available to interview, so they pushed the target date to fill back to February 1st. Can you imagine the time we would have wasted and candidates we would have lost if we didn’t ask for this information?