Recruiting and hiring a person to work at your small business can be a long process. First, you need to identify the need for a new employee. What follows are the many steps of recruiting, interviewing and onboarding.
Unavoidable complexity leads to mistakes in the hiring process
Unlike Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”), the reality of the long hiring process is, “The more complex the process, the more places it can be broken by mistakes.”
Unfortunately, it’s hard to shorten the hiring process. Aside from all the legal rules a company must comply with when recruiting and hiring, office politics and personalities often get in the way too. And this only extends the process while making it more complex.
These mistake are broken into three parts:
- Recruiting mistakes such as failing to describe the position as clearly as possible and not researching the right compensation levels for the position once it’s defined;
- Interview mistakes like neglecting to phone screen in order to save time by winnowing down the candidate pool and dominating the one-on-one conversation when you should be learning about the candidate by listening; and
- Job offer mistakes such as hiring too fast out of desperation to fill the position and failing to issue a job offer in writing, which creates the possibility of misunderstandings and legal issues.
While the recruitment and hiring process will likely always be long and complex, doing your homework and learning about the most common hiring mistakes can go a long way in assuring that you get through it as smoothly as possible.
