How Direct Sourcing Helps You Avoid the 7 Deadly Hiring Sins

Finding quality candidates to join your workforce comes with its fair share of obstacles. It’s not easy to source applicants that match the specific skill sets you need with the experiences you’re looking for.

There are several deadly hiring sins recruiters or hiring managers make daily, including neglecting to create a talent forecasting plan, hiring solely on experience and academic credentials, rushing through the recruitment process, hiring based on subconscious biases, rejecting a candidate for being overqualified, waiting too long for the perfect candidate, and relying too much on a candidate’s references. 

As a talent management solution, direct sourcing is second to none. It empowers hiring managers to create a pool of qualified candidates available at your fingertips, saving you time and resources while helping you hire better, faster, and cheaper.

Let’s take a closer look at how direct sourcing offers a solution to 7 common mistakes hiring managers make through the recruiting process.

1. Failing to Plan for High Demand Periods

Flying by the seat of your pants may work in some industries, but human resources isn’t one of them. Failing to forecast upcoming talent requirements means when work demands ramp up, it’s a scramble to quickly find skilled candidates to support your changing business needs. Rather than being prepared to respond to booming business, you’re forced to make rash hiring decisions to quickly acquire new personnel, devastating the quality of temporary or permanent hires for your brand.

How Direct Sourcing Helps: Talent forecasting plays a major role in direct sourcing as a talent management solution. Identifying business trends and predicting peak business periods allows you to distinguish between needing help on a full-time or contract basis. Get a leg up on the competition by engaging independent workers within your talent pool. Set the contract terms that support the brand, including duration and compensation, and let your pre-sourced talent work for you.

2. Hiring Solely on Experience and Academic Credentials

The most experienced or most knowledgeable in your field doesn’t always translate to the best fit for your business. Keep in mind that you’re hiring a candidate – not their resume. The ideal applicant is not only highly qualified for the position but is also a match for your workplace culture.

Kat Boogaard of The Muse says this about the importance of being a good fit:

“Think about it this way: If you don’t have the technical capabilities required to do the job, you might be well-liked in the office, but actually executing the work will be a constant challenge for you. On the flipside of that coin, possessing the technical know-how—but not the soft skills —will usually end up with you having great ideas, yet being unable to actually communicate and implement those.”

How Direct Sourcing Helps: Recruiting with a direct sourcing strategy improves your ability to source candidates that are the ideal fit for your workplace. Drawing from a pool of talent that has previously demonstrated their skills and abilities keeps you from limiting your search to candidates who solely appear qualified on paper. Employing direct sourcing as a talent management solution enables you to do just that. Assess a candidate’s job performance and prioritize top performers for future deployment.

3. Rushing the recruitment process

Recruiting is a lengthy process that involves: attracting and engaging the right candidates, screening, interviewing, reference checks, onboarding and training. 

An opening on your team can lead to gaps in productivity and lost revenue, which puts pressure on hiring managers to quickly fill the position. This can lead to a poor hiring decision for the available position and quick turnover, an expensive mistake as the average cost of one bad hire is nearly $15,000!

How direct sourcing helps: A frequent need to hire within short timelines makes direct sourcing an optimal solution. Drawing from a pool of predetermined and engaged qualified candidates saves you time from sourcing candidates on a per-job basis. Maintaining a pool of candidates as your talent management solution helps to ensure a quick and effective hire every single time.

4. Hiring based on subconscious biases

Studies have shown that racially and ethnically diverse companies outperform their competitors by a whopping 35 percent, yet so many human resources professionals still hold unchecked biases from gender to age to race. Subconscious biases are not only damaging to creating equality and diversity in your workplace, but they also shed a negative light on your company’s brand. By refusing to address your subconscious biases within the recruitment process, employers limit their candidate selection, screening only applicants they falsely believe will succeed in the role.

How direct sourcing helps: Through a standardized recruitment process like direct sourcing, you’ll limit the potential of biases in your talent management and hiring practices. And since 67 percent of job seekers have acknowledged that a diverse workforce is important when considering job offers, diminishing subconscious biases has the potential to drastically enhance your brand’s productivity while increasing the numbers in your talent pool.

5. Rejecting a candidate for being overqualified

There’s a common misconception that exists among recruiters when it comes to overqualified candidates. Many fear over qualifications will lead to increased turnover as these applicants seek out career advancements or higher compensation. Dismissing a candidate for being too qualified only harms your own business, however, as these workers will quickly be snatched up by your competitors.

How direct sourcing helps: By hiring through direct sourcing and filling your talent pool, you’re only engaging candidates who are looking to work with your brand, giving you access to some of the best skilled workers in your industry. Keep highly qualified candidates engaged through a direct sourcing talent management program that provides your talent database with frequent check-ins and updates.

6. Waiting for the perfect candidate

In the recruitment process, time is money. This makes filling opening roles quickly and accurately a priority. Searching for the elusive “unicorn” causes many recruitment personnel to whip through high numbers of applicant resumes and interviews, overlooking the perfectly adequate candidate that may be right at your fingertips.

How direct sourcing helps: Through direct sourcing’s talent pools, you’ll create a database of qualified candidates ready to support your changing business needs. By re-engaging existing talent, you can drastically cut your hiring time and depend on tried-and-true candidates who bear the capabilities to succeed.

7. Relying Too Much on a Candidate’s References

There’s no denying the importance of conducting a thorough reference check on potential applicants. Doing so can offer essential insight on a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses while providing an evaluation of their soft and hard skills. However, putting too much weight in a candidate’s references can limit you from seeing a talent’s potential. After all, a candidate’s experiences are as unique as the company they work for, and performance can largely be affected by several factors, including environment, colleagues, and management styles. Just because one employee comes highly recommended by their references doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll succeed with you.

How direct sourcing helps: Investing your time and resources in a direct sourcing recruitment plan ensures your talent pool is always flush with vetted and trained candidates ready to get to work. Engaging and re-engaging these candidates creates a directory of some of the most proven talent in the business. In good time you’ll create a self-sustaining talent pool, and you can kiss those pesky reference checks goodbye.

VeriSource is Your Solution for Avoiding Deadly Hiring Sins

Our hands-off recruiting solution, VeriSource, is powered by industry-leading advisors for finding the perfect hire with an easy-to-use interface to manage the talent acquisition and application process from start finish.

Interview-ready candidates are passed on to your hiring managers, thoroughly vetted by us. The searching, screening, verifying, and recruiting is done for you so you can spend your time interviewing and hiring. Request a free trial or speak to a talent advisor (732-534-3888) to understand how our solution can work for you!