Many companies are in a mad dash to hire people right now. During the pandemic, businesses everywhere lost staff, so numbers are down, and the race to get the best talent is heating up. For this reason, it’s critical that leaders avoid making mistakes during the hiring process. If you’re hiring new employees, keep reading to learn some of the most common hiring mistakes we see businesses make (and how to fix them).

Not Giving Everyone a Chance

It’s okay to list requirements on a job posting; however, you don’t want to cast the net too narrowly and miss out on talented candidates. Using a solution that looks beyond the resume will give you the best opportunity to interview people from different backgrounds and experiences. Even if they don’t check all of the requirement boxes, they may bring hidden success factors to the table that you likely won’t see from a resume alone. You may be surprised by who you find once you loosen the strings.

Relying Too Heavily on Your Opinion

Relying too heavily on gut instinct can lead to bias. For example, some employers may apply different or unfair standards when evaluating potential candidates. While bias can sometimes be conscious or explicit, bias is often unconscious, stemming from pervasive stereotypes or personal past experiences.

Fortunately, there are a lot of simple ways that you can reduce bias during the hiring process, including leveraging predictive and objective data-driven tools that can help you automate the candidate screening process.

Failure To Use Talent and Organization Services

Talent and organization services exist to help improve the likelihood of success and remove biases from the hiring process. Too often, businesses hire employees based purely on what they’ve done (for example, just what’s on someone’s resume) instead of a more holistic view of them, including who they are as an individual. Our predictive people platform empowers leaders with objective insights to make better hiring decisions based on data and behavioral science instead of on gut instinct, guesswork, or bias.

By avoiding these three common hiring mistakes, your leaders and hiring managers will be in the best position to hire the right talent for every role—building strong teams and a more productive workforce.