As a professional tasked with adding top talent to your organization, your mistakes can be particularly costly. Whether team productivity or culture suffers, 
making the wrong hire or missing the right hire can set you back months. At just about every stage of the hiring funnel, it's important to be aware of some common oversights and limitations of the interview process that could yield some bad eggs. Read on to make sure you're not guilty of these top hiring mistakes.
"I Didn't Sign up for This"
When pitching your company to new people, you'll inevitably end up painting it in an overwhelmingly positive light. While this can be necessary to make the sale, you have to be upfront with the candidate about the challenges of the role. If you lead talent to believe things are far different at your company than they are, you're going to end up with disengaged, disgruntled employees who are sour about being misled. Try framing your explanation not in terms of what's bad about the company, but what's hard about the job.
Get Bored of Boards
Relying too much on job postings, or for that matter your inbound funnel, can be detrimental to your hiring goals. Even if you're a hugely popular company with thousands of applications to sift through, you can't be sure the perfect hire is going to waltz in the door on their own. Speaking from experience, candidates on the hunt for a new role quickly grow weary of browsing endless lists of job posts and sending off applications into an unresponsive void. Set and forget job posts are one channel for talent, but never rest on your laurels with these sort of automated recruiting tools. Pick up the phone and go after the people YOU think are perfect.
Get the Reference
So you've called the references listed by your candidate, and they had nothing but wonderful things to say. Shocker. References are carefully selected and warned about your call, so they're ready to be positive. Many recruiters will call the listed references and then proclaim they've heard enough, but if you want to make the most of a reference call, you'll need to dig a little deeper. Find a former team member or supervisor through LinkedIn and try to get in touch. Unlisted, unprepared references may provide more candid and illuminating responses than their prepped counterparts.
Upvote Limitation
The boiling down to a binary Yes/No ruling on the part of the interviewer can be severely limiting. On candidates we interview at Entelo, even in the case of a strong yes there is usually a follow up along the lines of "This person could be a great fit, but here are my concerns...". Simply voting yes/no across a team does not include the healthy discussion necessary for addressing everyone's thoughts about the candidate, so reliance on this process has serious limitations.
Swing and a Miss
Just like the nightmare mistake of making a bad hire, failing to close a great hire can be equally devastating. According to the recruiters I've spoken with, one of the most common reasons they miss out on great hires is due to speed of the hiring process. If you've got someone in your pipeline who's truly talented and a great fit, odds are someone else sees that in them too. Shuffling your feet with an offer letter can lead you to lose out on a candidate, so once the team is on board, you've got to move quickly. This is also a huge advantage for recruiters at a smaller company who have less red tape to navigate with it comes to adding talent. Use this to your advantage and accelerate the close when you can.
What are some common employee hiring mistakes you've seen? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!
