I am going to do an unusual post that isn’t directly related to tech, but is very relevant to what I do at work. Hiring - while I don’t claim to be a know all expert, but having worked in this industry for a while now, working with recruiters and speaking to potentially hundreds of candidates yearly, I have developed my own opinions in this space

Here are some common pitfalls I have seen, as well as made:

  1. Screening profiles purely based on the fact that candidate has been in high profile companies. Unfortunately this is a common bias that everyone, including myself have. While with today’s landscape, tools like GPT realy helps with better content writing, we still have to acknowledge that not everyone is good at GTM (which is what applying for a job is). If you are serious about hiring amazing talents, it is a much better idea to relax the CV screening, instead incorporate a solid screenining process that actually involves automatically testing/screening candidates based on their responses
  2. Not having bar raiser rounds - Everyone has a set of biases, while more seasoned folks are more conscious about their biasness and will guard against it, you can never fully avoid it. Hence you always want a 2nd opinion from someone that is not you, preferably someone that isn’t a yes man and is not afraid of voicing their opinions even if it contradicts yours. This can give you a more complete view/perspective of what you are committing to if you were to hire the candidate
  3. Over/under advertising what role you are hiring for - Don’t do this. I can see how sometimes there can be huge amount of ignorance in terms of what role you need to hire. If you are not an expert, pay an expert to do it. It may cost you some money but it will also save you lots of pain in terms of hiring and attracting the wrong talents, not to mention the wasting of your own, and the candidates’ time.
  4. Setting poor/improper KPIs for the talent acquisition(TA) team - Another common one, where we like to quantify things by volume, which incurs large and unnecessary costs to companies. I have seen TA teams getting set KPIs like, make sure we have 100 candidates in the pipeline, with no focus on actual quality. This just results in massive time wastage downstream, where your engineers have to take the extra time out to spend on the interviews when they could be doing productive code writing. Having volume is the right first step, however a recruitment pipeline is a funnel. It is also crucial to ensure that conversion rates are properly measured, and good KPIs are set around to ensure the pipeline gets correctly built and optimized
  5. Not pitching your company to the candidate, especially for more senior roles - On the worse spectrum of companies, I have been interviewed for a senior role in the company where in the very first meeting, all the hiring manager did was to bombard me with a million questions, with very weak answers in terms of what are they expecting this role to solve for them. If you are doing this, you will likely not get quality candidates. Remember, an interview is actually bi-directional. As much as you need to like the candidate, the candidate needs to like you too
  6. Having too long of an interview process/unclear process - When I build an interview pipeline, I always ensure that the entire interview process never exceeds 5 hours. It is super important to respect your candidate’s time. Ultimately small things like these are very reflective of your company culture, without even asking about culture. Remember that your candidate has taken their time off to do this with you
  7. Doing reference checks for the sake of reference checks - I know that under certain types of compliance, you are required to do reference checks. But did you also know that reference checks can be a good source of information to give you insights as to who you are hiring?
  8. Not getting back to candidates - Yes (at the time of writing) it is an employers’ market now, still, if a candidate has went into further/late stages of the interview process, it does make sense to provide a level of closure for the candidates. This can also translate to bad PR if not done well, especially with websites which allows you to leave feedback on companies these days
  9. Being overly specific and fixated on specific hard skills that candidates needs to have - This is still an extremely common practice today. I understand this might be a hard requirement if there are very specialized skillsets and focuses required, such as requirement to be able to create NLP or image recognition algorithms. But from what I have seen, this really is not the case for a lot of the hard skills. People seem to be fixated in terms of asking things like. Oh you need to know a specific programming language for at least 5 years, etc. Personally speaking, you should aim for diversity in your team when it comes to different skillsets and specializations. After all, you should be building a cross functional team based on modern agile methodologies. Not cookie cutter/cut paste personnels where everyone knows the same things. The better your team diversity, the more versatile and successful your team will be

My opinions are my own and this is my platform for doing so, if you have a different opinion feel free to leave some constructive criticism