5 mistakes rookie recruiters make, and how to avoid them

Every recruiter has a ‘rookie error’ story.

The good news, you don’t need to learn every lesson the hard way. In this blog, I am going to talk about the 5 most common mistakes that rookie recruiters make, and most importantly, how to avoid them.

Everyone makes mistakes, it’s how learn.

And every rookie recruiter, makes at least one of these mistakes. Unfortunately though, it can take them a little while to realise it. They are unaware that they are doing something wrong.

When they do realise, it changes the game for them.

Part of what I do as a recruitment coach and trainer, is to help rookie recruiters avoid these mistakes, and hit the ground running. You don’t have to make the mistakes to learn from them. If you can fast-forward the trial and error stage of your first year, then you can start reaping the rewards of your hard work earlier.

So what are these 5 common mistakes…

Mistake 1 – Not qualifying candidates thoroughly.

This is a classic rookie error.

Every recruiter has done it, and some still are a few years in. Mostly this is down to a lack of knowledge and experience on the part of the recruiter. You find a candidate that is relevant, you call them and ask them questions to confirm that your assumptions were correct.

You then move on with your process and repeat this until you get ‘lucky’ and find the right person.

When it comes to qualifying candidates, you don’t want to leave anything down to luck. You want to make sure that you leave no stone unturned. You also don’t want to fall foul of confirmation bias. The trap we fall into here is just asking the stock questions that you have on your sheet in front of you on your qualification checklist.  These are just a guide and help you to find your way through a call, they should not be your script. The questions that aren’t on that form are the most important one. The follow up questions.

The follow up questions are the ones that allow you to dive deeper in to the candidates answers. Follow up questions change the conversation from ‘have you done this?’ to ‘when have you done this?’ or ‘What have you done with this?’ These 2 questions give you a much bigger picture of their experience, knowledge and ability in that area. One of my biggest red flags is when I hear a recruiter as a candidate ‘Have you do this before?’ and they reply instantly with ‘Yep , yeah I can do that. I’m probably one of the best people you will talk to with that.’ This then makes a rookie recruiter light up and think ‘I found my candidate. They are the best at that so they are a osure fire placement!’

This often leads to the client saying that they are a terrible candidate and didn’t know what they were on about.

Make sure you are asking follow up questions to their answers. The more information you can gather the better.

Mistake 2 – Overpromising

One of the first things I tell new recruiters, is DO NOT PROMISE ANYTHING!

You cannot guarantee anything that is out of your control. I hear recruiters promise that they will be able to get candidates interviews, or worse, job offers! Or they promise clients that they can find great candidates or fill a role. You have no control over that. Sure you can have influence, but as a new recruiter, that will be minimal.

All you can promise is that you will do you best for them.

If you promise candidates or clients things, then the second that you don’t come good on your promise, they will throw it back at you and your reputation, credibility and their trust will be damaged. 

Instead of promising things, you need to manage expectations. Let them know that you will do everything that you can, but there is no guarantee that you will be able to do anything. This way, if you do manage to do it, then it’s a huge bonus and a boost to your reputation, credibility and trust is built.

You need to remember that you are a Recruitment Consultant and that a huge part of what you do is consult with candidates and clients to help them succeed in their job hunt or hiring.

Mistake 3 – Relying on job boards

Job boards can be great, but they should only be a piece of the puzzle , not the entire solution.

When you are looking for candidates, there are many things you could do. Yes by all means, go to the job boards and search the 1000’s of CV’s that are on there, but don’t forget, everyone else has the ability to do this. All the other recruiters (and even the client) can, and probably already have, done this.

You are all fishing from the same pond.

If everyone is searching through the same CV’s in the same place, then it becomes a competition about who is the best at search strings and fastest at sifting through the sea of CVs. This is not a fun game to play. The key is to change the game. Make the game about who can make the pool of candidates the biggest to find the best talent possible. The first place you should be going is your CRM.

The CRM is one of the most underutilised tools when it comes to sourcing talent. You probably tell your clients that you have a database of 90,000 candidates, yet you don’t think to look there first. Once you have created your shortlist there, that’s when you can start to look to see if there are any new or different CV,s. You also have LinkedIn, which is essentially the worlds biggest job board.

The trick that most new recruiters miss is referrals. If you ask every person that you speak to who the best person is that could do that job, then you are making your pool as big as humanly possible.

When you get a new vacancy, before you get to work sourcing, think about every possible place you could fins a candidate. Then create a plan to find them.

Mistake 4 – Poor candidate and client prep

Interview prep is one of the most important parts of the process for a recruiter.

This is the last chance you have to influence the process before the candidate and client meet for the first time. Yet a vast majority of recruiters either don’t do it, or do it so badly that they may as well not have done it in the first place. If they do prep the candidate well, the chances are, that they have never even considered prepping the client.

Don’t assume that everyone knows how to do an interview.

In an interview prep call with a candidate you need to cover all bases. The way a typical prep call goes is as follows:

Recruiter: ‘Are you ready for your interview?’

Candidate: ‘Yep I’m good no need to worry’

Recruiter: ‘ Great, have you done any research?’

Candidate: ‘Yeah’

Recruiter: ‘Great, I will call you after to see how it went’

This is far from a prep call. This is pointless. What have you learnt from this call? When you do a prep call you need to dive into the weeds, what have they learnt, can they tell you something specific about a project, the team or the company? Do they know the job description inside out? Ask them some competency question based around the job description and discuss their answers. How can they make them stronger? Reconfirm why they are interested in the job, discuss how this compares to their current situation. Have they got any questions prepared for the client?

As well as this, you should be doing the house keeping questions : Get them to confirm when and where the interview is. What are they going to wear? How are they getting there? How long is the journey? Etc. This may seem excessive, but you may have heard stories about candidates that turn up in hoodies or wear a dressing gown on a teams interview. Don’t leave anything to chance, don’t assume they know what they are doing.

When it comes to a client prep call, this can be framed as a fact finding mission. How do they run interviews? What do they look for? Who will be in the interview? What are their roles? How do they assess the candidates? Find out as much about the process a you can, this way you can best advise your candidate. You can then flip the call and start to discuss the candidate(s). What are they key things the interviewer should focus on. Is there anything that they should know about the candidate that will help the interview go well?

The more you can influence, then better.

Mistake 5 – Not tracking pipeline and activity

This is a mistake that many recruiters make and it causes more stress than is needed.

You will have heard about the peaks and troughs of recruitment, well this is a result of this mistake. Not keeping an eye on your pipeline will cause it to run dry frequently. It is easy to get carried away and hyper focus on the main activity at that time like BD or filling a job you have just brought in. If you take your eye of of it, then as soon as you have filled those vacancies, you have an empty pipeline. You will see that certain people always seem to be filling vacancies. Every month they are hitting big numbers, where as everyone else is boom or bust. These people are consistent because they are conscious about their pipeline and always doing activities to keep it full and moving.

Not tracking activity, or KPIs, adds to this problem. You need to keep an eye on the activity you are doing and adjust when needed. If you have seen that most of your work has been candidate calls new BD. If you have just been doing BD, then don’t forget to get back in touch with your active candidates to keep them warm. Tracking you activity also helps you understand why your got the results you got. If you have a good month, look at the last few months activity, what can you see that’s different to the months before you have a zero month?

Tracking activities and KPI’s aren’t there so that the management can crack the whip, they are there to help you learn.

You have probably read this and see a few things that you are doing right now that you shouldn’t be. That’s okay, we have all done at least one of these, and most recruiters are probably still doing them. Mistakes are how we learn, as long as we recognise that we are doing them and make changes.