Hiring is both an art and a science.

As a hiring manager, you’re in charge of navigating this delicate balancing process to shape your organization’s workforce. Unfortunately, hiring has only continued to get harder and more competitive over the past few years, making your role even more difficult.

To make sure you’re hiring better talent to build your best possible team, avoid these top five mistakes a hiring manager can make.

1. Only accepting perfection

No one is perfect — but some hiring managers think they’ll find the perfect candidate. We hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not likely going to happen.

There’s no such thing as a perfect candidate, or person. While you’re waiting for someone who checks every single box for your ideal hire, talent is passing you by and being snatched up by your competition. You don’t have to settle to make a hire; you just need to prioritize what requirements matter the most for this position and what’s nice to have in a candidate, which can be taught if the employee wants to learn them. Reframing recruiting like this broadens your candidate pool and improves your odds of making a great hire.

2. Holding too many interviews

Not only is passing over quality talent because they aren’t picture perfect a common fallacy, but many hiring managers are also holding way to many interviews in general. While you want to make absolutely certain that you’re making the right hire, you can start overcompensating for a lack of candidate organization with excess interviews. Some hiring managers want everyone to talk to the candidate to get their opinion, even if that necessitated an extended hiring process. But that extra time spent interviewing is costing you top talent. According to Hireology data, 61% of job seekers accepted the first offer they received in their most recent job search, meaning you need to move quickly to hire the best candidates.

Let’s be real here: not every role needs four interviews before the candidate receives an offer letter — especially for roles with high turnover or where labor is in high demand. Generally, you should only conduct two, maybe three, interviews for entry-level positions before extending an offer. The first interview in this process is generally a phone screening too, so it’s really only one in-person interview before someone is hired. Of course, for positions in management or higher, you should hold a few more interviews with people they’ll be in close proximity with to make sure everyone gels well.

3. Moving too slowly

Some hiring processes run unnecessarily long — and it costs the company in time and productivity lost. The modern job seeker doesn’t have to wait on you to offer employment; there’s more than one opening available for every person on the job market right now. Most companies nowadays also hire within two weeks from a candidate submitting an application too, which is important to remember since a third of applicants apply to 16+ jobs at once. 

To keep the process moving faster, you should use text messages to keep in contact with candidates. Considering that most people have their phones on their person during the day, it makes sense that the majority (53%) of applicants say that they typically check text messages before email. And they’re not shy about texting back, either! About nine out of 10 candidates are willing to talk to recruiters via text, making this a valuable tool in any hiring toolkit.

4. Not capturing insights about applicants

While you should be taking notes in real time during the interview, what you do with that information after the interview is just as important. Not refining these notes can make it really hard to compare candidates to one another in an efficient way when it comes time to make a decision. And forget about trying to find a specific candidate you have in mind; jotted notes typically aren’t optimized for searching or skimming ability.

After the interview, you should rewrite the notes you took immediately after finishing the conversation and revisit these notes during the time you set aside at the end of your day for hiring administrative tasks. It’s during this period that you should score applicants based on how they compare to your ideal candidate. Rating systems based on visuals, like stars, make team collaborations easier without having to click into the candidate profile.

5. Not communicating with candidates enough

Finally, and perhaps the most costly mistake, is not communicating with your candidates enough throughout the process. If you’re only reaching out to candidates when you need to do something like schedule an interview or make an offer can lead to increased rates of candidates ghosting you, or dropping out of the hiring process without warning.

These days, it is so important to stay in touch with candidates, even if you can’t update them on the status of their application. Recent Hireology data showed that the number one reason that candidates ghost potential employers is due to a lack of communication, so going multiple days without reaching out to candidates is completely unacceptable in the current hiring market. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this task either, thanks to automations built into applicant tracking systems (ATS). Now, I let candidates know immediately that we’ve received their application, lay out next steps, and invite them to complete a pre-screening survey — all without typing a thing!

It’s also important to let candidates know that they didn’t get the job, especially if they were top contenders. You don’t want to burn any bridges here; after all, you might want to reach out to them when you have a similar role available — it just might turn into one of your fastest hires yet!

Want to avoid these common hiring manager mistakes?

Partnering with the right ATS can help you, and your team, run efficient hiring processes that put the right people in the right seats at your organization — and Hireology wants to help! Schedule a demo today to see why we’re the leading ATS for decentralized multi-location businesses.