One of the top priorities for all businesses is to try and attract the top candidates in the market for their roles, which in today’s saturated recruitment landscape is often no easy task. 

One of the best ways to ensure you are attracting and maintaining the top level of talent is by building a reputation of providing a positive candidate experience for applicants to your jobs, which will help you stand out from the crowd and demonstrate extra value for your roles.

Below we outline a few key mistakes to be mindful of avoiding when working through the process of filling a job so that you have the best chance of obtaining high level applicants both now and down the track.

• Lack of communication

This one’s pretty simple. It’s crucial to ensure you maintain regular and open communication with candidates during the recruitment process to keep them informed of where they’re at and when they might hear back from you with a final decision. If you utilise poor communication and keep candidates in the dark or don’t respond to them at all, they’re likely to become frustrated and possibly even look for other opportunities where the process is more transparent.

• Leaving out important information in the job ad

Your job ad is often the first experience a candidate has with your company, so it’s important to make a good first impression. Wherever possible, try to include a salary or at least a salary range in the ad and ensure that the job description actually matches up with the role at hand. If your job ad is vague or missing key information, candidates are more likely to skip over it or become frustrated if they find discrepancies in the ad compared to the actual role.

• Lengthy recruitment process

While it’s important to make sure you have the necessary steps in place to find the right candidate for the role at hand, an overly lengthy or onerous recruitment process is likely to frustrate applicants and push them away to other more efficient businesses. Depending on the seniority of the role, try and keep the number of interviews to around two and refrain from making candidates go through tedious aptitude and skill tests as much as possible. 

• Interrogative interviews

While you no doubt have a number of key questions to ask during your interviews, try and keep in mind that an interview is not an interrogation and see it as an opportunity to get to know the candidate on a more friendly level as well as finding out about their work experience and skill sets. Particularly for high-quality applicants who may be interviewing for multiple roles, an interview can be as much about them making a decision on you as you on them – if they have a negative interview experience, they’re likely to go elsewhere when it comes time to make a decision.

Want to make sure you attract the top talent for your business?

With offices all around Australia, our Workforce Extensions recruitment teams are always on hand to help find the right staff for your needs. Click here to get in touch with your local office and start the conversation today.