10 Easy Ways to Damage Your Brand During the Recruiting Process
When you bring talent into your organization you are opening the door to the outside world and showing everyone how your company operates. It is an opportunity to show your company’s culture, your efficiency, your collective intelligence. Or you can damage your brand.
In general - in VERY general terms - companies that are good at recruiting are usually good at other things, too - like whatever they do to make money. Companies that are bad at recruiting are generally bad at other things, too. Recruiting is just a process that can be broken down into 6 or 8 components and mastered like any other process. It is not rocket science. That is why it is amazing how many companies don’t do it well. It damages their brand.
So just in case you are looking to sabotage your company, here are 10 easy ways to damage your brand during the recruiting process:
1. Have a human resources professional phone screen your candidates. Give them technical questions to ask and do not explain to them what the questions mean. Let them evaluate whether or not the candidates are qualified enough to move on to the next round.
2. Advertise your position all over the place. Really wallpaper the universe with your job openings so that everyone knows exactly how long the positions have been open and how desperate you are to fill them.
3. Don’t give feedback. In fact, don’t communicate at all. Invite people on site for interviews, express interest in them and then never get back to them again. Do not return their calls or their recruiter’s calls. Let them know that you are a real animal.
4. Give a salary range up front and then after interviewing the candidate for weeks, offer them $20,000 less than the bottom of the range. They will really hate you.
5. Interview a candidate from another city and then offer him the position without providing any relocation assistance.
6. Let your human resources department determine the qualifications and appropriate compensation level for your position.
7. Invite a candidate for an on-site interview from across the country and then don’t reimburse him for his travel expenses.
8. Put a candidate through a three month interview process and then demand that they start in one week after you make them the offer. Because you have a tremendous sense of urgency.
9. Have your candidates interview with people that would report to them and with people that are also up for the job.
10. Make sure that a C-level person speak with and/or approve every hire. Make sure that they have no idea what the candidate does for a living and ask them to evaluate his qualification and approve the terms of the offer.
Very nicely written. I can say that I’ve had a few of these 10 ideas impact me in the past. My personal favorite is #8.
Thanks Jason. The difficult part was getting it down to 10!