The unforgivable tech mistakes costing you top talent

There’s a perfect storm forcing recruiters to step their game up: US unemployment was at 3.7% in September amid greater demand for highly skilled workers.

Despite having the most advanced recruitment technology, however, employers are continuing to lose potential hires because of a few mistakes with their tools.

In the face of a looming talent shortage, the slightest mistake can prove costly.

“If you slip up during any step, you’ll lose the really good candidates because they’re being courted by so many organizations,” Matt Singer, vice president of marketing at Jobvite, told HR Tech News.

These blunders range from carelessness to an overall lack of strategy.

Mistake #1: Employers forget to place the candidate at the center of the recruitment process
Attracting the right talent is about understanding who your target is and speaking their language. Recruiters should offer better content and a personalized experience through continuous candidate engagement.

Get creative and “cut through a flood of information that [candidates] are getting,” said Singer. It also helps to choose recruitment and marketing channels, such as LinkedIn, which can convey the right message to the right audience.

Mistake 2: Recruiters force candidates through a long and tedious registration process
Outdated applicant tracking systems (ATS) require candidates to create an account and fill out online forms that can take up to 10 pages long.

“You’re going to lose all the good ones if you make them fill out a 10-page questionnaire before they can apply for a job,” said Singer. He recommended cutting down the apply process to one to two clicks tied to the candidates’ LinkedIn profiles.

“Anything above 10 to 15 questions, you start to see the significant fall off in the apply process,” he said.

Mistake 3: Recruiters receive applications but never update candidates on their status
A chief complaint of jobseekers is the failure of companies to establish communication lines with their candidates – ignoring applicants’ interest in the brand.

“I think you can really do damage to your employer brand when folks feel like they submit a resume and it goes into a black hole,” Singer said.

Some candidates who make it midway through the process may be interviewed initially – only to be left hanging without any word from the recruiter thereafter.

“They never hear back or just get a canned email, which then sends them out to Glassdoor and Twitter to do damage to the employer brand,” he said.

Mistake 4: There is a disconnect between recruitment technology and recruitment outcomes
Employers can purchase all the latest ATS or candidate relationship management tools but – without a candidate-centric recruitment philosophy – they will end up losing in the talent war.

While CEOs prioritize finding the right people to hit their business goals, they don’t often “connect the importance of the technology they’re using with the outcomes of the hires,” Singer said.

An organization’s choice of recruitment platform can make or break the candidate experience, but an even bigger mistake is to go through the talent war without a clear battle plan.