Hiring the right people is critical for organizational success. However, despite concerted efforts to hire the right talent, large organizations face specific challenges in their recruitment efforts.

Among these challenges are having insufficient time to review high volumes of job applications, recruiting hastily due to pressures to fill vacant positions, and failing to articulate the company culture or job requirements to candidates. 

Hiring mistakes increase recruitment costs and training, and negatively impact overall productivity and business outcomes. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh estimates that bad hires cost Zappos over $100 Mn.

If you’re looking to optimize productivity, you may want to first review if your organization is committing these hiring mistakes.

Not fully understanding the requirements of a role

Before you post the job ad, ask yourself, when was the last time the job description (JD) was reviewed? 

Because of the limited time, resources and bigger volume of roles to fill, large organizations sometimes forget to update the requirements for the role that they’re hiring for. 

Not fully thinking through what the new employee would actually be doing may set him or her up for failure, thus impacting productivity and increasing costs.

More importantly, many organizations overlook the importance of characteristics and behavioral traits that are needed for the new employee to be successful in this role, even when research shows that personality is a more telling factor of success in a role than IQ.

Apart from outlining the work scope and the responsibilities of the job, don’t forget to analyze your current team and think about the additional skills and experience that the new hire would help to contribute to your overall team’s productivity. 

Being unaware of hiring biases

Biases and snap judgments are a part of everyday interaction whether we like it or not. More often than not, these biases come into play when making hiring decisions. We tend to form an impression based on gut feeling, and often this gut feeling is skewed towards how much the candidate is or isn’t like us.

In large organizations, HR teams are more likely to be overwhelmed by the volume of applications coming in and beating time to fill up vacancies to be bothered by these biases. 

Organizations that acknowledge these biases and take steps to mitigate them will fare better in avoiding hiring mistakes.

Underestimating social media

One of the missteps that large organizations make is underestimating the power of social media for candidate sourcing, especially for young talent.

Instead of posting job ads in the same old job portals which will give you access to the same old pool of candidates, leverage the audiences on social media via targeted ads to reach a larger pool of applicants from various backgrounds. 

To be seen as an employer of choice, it’s advisable to have an active social media presence. If your last social media post was in 2017, it may suggest to your prospects that your organization is out-of-touch with current trends. Candidates are shoppers too as they evaluate a company’s brand via social media in search for the right fit. 

Not leveraging technology to reduce bias

Up until recently, hiring decisions have been very subjective, as plenty of guesswork was involved in deciphering the characteristics of a candidate in the typical process.

For example, many think that extroverted candidates will fair better in sales roles when in reality, the more important factor for success was neither extroversion or introversion, but warmth and competence.

Today, there are plenty of tools in the market to assist HR in streamlining hiring processes. For talent acquisition, popularity is gaining for SaaS tools like Pulsifi with an AI component to analyze people patterns, learn from outcomes, and generate highly accurate predictions on a candidate’s behavior and performance.

These tools are the way of the future for HR, with a 2019 survey by LinkedIn citing that 76 percent of recruiters see AI as significantly impacting hiring, especially in the areas of candidate sourcing and screening.

Large organizations with a high hiring volume will especially benefit from these emerging trends and disruptive tech tools that reduce their burden on manual work and enable them to get back to focusing on HR strategic goals instead.