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Start hereYour hiring process is losing you the best candidatesLearn the seven essential recruitment lessons from Futura Talent founder Guy Allen on how to avoid hiring traps.Business Blind Spots7 min
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Blog 7 min read

Your hiring process is losing you the best candidates

Lewis Dowling Managing Director and Consultant

Learn the seven essential recruitment lessons from Futura Talent founder Guy Allen on how to avoid hiring traps, build a candidate-friendly process, and attract top talent.

Contents

The job ad is ready, the interview process is decided, and you’ve scheduled in time to review the applications. At that moment, you don’t consider how that AI interviewer could be discriminatory, or how you could lose your best candidate after you made the offer.

Nobody wants to hire a bad employee. But the more filters you add, the more likely the perfect candidate will decide that you’re simply not worth their time.

We chatted with Guy Allen, founder of recruitment consultancy Futura Talent. With nearly a decade of experience at Reed and running their technology practice, Guy has seen the traps that business owners fall into. And he knows exactly how to avoid them. Here are his seven lessons on how to run your next recruitment.

1. Your process reflects your culture

The core of Guy’s advice was centred around a single idea: everything you do shows your potential candidate something about your business. Every good element will attract the strongest candidates. And every bad aspect will scare them away.

“The salary you’re offering, the wording and structure of your job spec, the interview process, the benefits you offer, they all tell a story about your culture and environment,” Guy said.

One example of this is in the interview process itself. Guy explained: “If you need seven interviews because you can’t sync up everyone’s schedules, what does that say about your business?”

Not only can this deter good candidates from your business, it can also harm your reputation. People are far more likely to tell five people about a bad experience than a good one. The best candidates know their worth. As soon as they get a bad impression of you, they’ll simply go someplace else.

“That’s something you can’t afford, particularly early on when you’re building or scaling your company” Guy said. “If you want the best people, you need to give them a good experience.”

2. The more hurdles, the more frustration

Nowadays, it’s far easier for candidates to use AI to tailor their applications. This can lead to companies getting inundated with responses. It’s tempting to use AI to filter through those candidates. But that can be unreliable at best, so it’s far less common than you’d think, Guy said.

In one case, a company realised that using AI to filter would cause a backlash. So they asked candidates to record a short video. Sounds sensible, right? Unfortunately, the solution to one problem created another. That extra step was just too much. 

“Yes, with that video you’ll have fewer AI applicants,” Guy said. “But you’ll also have far fewer non-AI applicants. Good people will think: I’m not auditioning for X-Factor. Why are you getting me to record a video?”

Instead, potentially great applicants turn to companies that aren’t asking them to jump through arbitrary hoops. If you don’t respect their time now, why would you once you’ve hired them?

“You need to remember that it’s not just two minutes of their time,” Guy said. “It’s all the time they take to prepare and practice it.”

What you actually need to do is be more proactive. Figure out who your ideal candidate would be and reach out to those people directly. It could be that they’ve worked in a specific role, a competitor, or for a company that’s solved a similar problem.

“It’s time-consuming, but far more effective, and the quality of the hire you can make will significantly improve,” Guy said.

3. That AI interviewer can be discriminatory

Another reason to avoid extra steps in your interview process is that they’re not suitable for everyone. An AI interviewer won’t develop the same rapport as a real human. There are no facial expressions or body language for the candidate to react to, so it’s not easy to have a natural conversation.

Guy told the story of an excellent neurodivergent candidate. During the interview, they paused to think and the bot thought they’d finished and moved on. The candidate didn’t want to interrupt, so he let it run. Despite being suitable for the role, he performed far less well than he would’ve had it been a real person.

“These hoops have the potential to discriminate against neurodivergent people or just people who struggle with recording a message for any reason,” Guy said.

Only a real person can get a feel for whether someone will fit into your culture or spot and probe a weakness in their answer. There are too many subtleties to human behaviour and conversation for a machine to notice. Sure, an AI can ask a series of rote questions. But it can’t notice when there’s more to the story or help them feel at ease.

And if you want to reflect that your business is caring or a great place to work, you can’t do that with an AI interviewer.

4. Don’t play around with salaries

“Put the salary on the advert,” Guy said.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it sets expectations for the role and establishes that you won’t mess the candidate around. It shows that you’re honest and transparent.

But there are also inclusive reasons. Part of why women get unpaid for their work is because salaries are often hidden from the outset. If you’re clear from the beginning, you show that you must be paying everyone fairly as you’re allowing your people to compare.

This also avoids tensions when making your offer. You’ve already given the figure. Don’t try to undercut it just to save a little. That’ll just tarnish your reputation and leave a bad impression.

Of course, there are rare occasions where offering less is fair. But there needs to be a justifiable reason and a path to that original offer. Perhaps they didn’t quite pass a technical test and need some additional training. If so, show them the timeline to get to the level you expect and exactly when their salary will increase to the offer.

5. Keep communicating, even after you’ve made an offer

Thankfully, good practices can reflect well on your business, too. If you respect people’s time and treat them well, it’ll show you in the best light. And perhaps the most impactful is how you speak to them.

“Communication is the most important aspect,” Guy said. “Keep people engaged, talk to them, communicate clearly, give them timelines and meet them.”

This goes beyond the interviews, though. Many companies will communicate well during the process, but stop once they make their offer. But you need to keep talking to them. Invite them to meet the team or begin welcoming them to the company.

“Three months is a long time, and anything can happen,” Guy explained. “You know who is speaking to them on a regular basis? Their current employer, steadily realising how important this person is and throwing more and more at them to change their mind and stay.”

This can be where newer hiring managers get blindsided. Candidates get offers from another job they applied to or they simply decide to stay in their current role.

“If you’re in contact with them, you might not be able to stop it. But you’ll be better prepared to deal with the consequences,” Guy said.

6. Think through what you really need

Often, processes become complicated when businesses try to mimic Google or don’t quite understand what they want from the candidate. You might have a list of requirements, but are they all really necessary?

“Don’t just focus on the role in general,” Guy said. “What are they actually going to do? What’s their individual contribution? What problems are you hoping they’ll fix? Then create the job spec around that.”

It’s about that role within your company, specifically. What works for you, won’t work for another business. If you’re a startup, you might be looking for someone with a much wider skillset who can help out with the marketing or going to events.

“The infrastructure, architecture and processes of a small business are completely different to a large one,” Guy said. “There’s a difference between hiring someone perfectly capable and someone who intimately knows your domain.”

7. Keep to a single recruiter

If you reach out to five recruiters to hire for your next role, you’re actually going to pit them against each other. Rather than focusing on bringing you the best candidate, they’re going to focus on being first to bring you any candidate.

“What are you incentivising?” Guy said. “It’s like getting five decorators at once and telling them whoever paints your house first is the one who gets paid. They won’t weigh their own candidates against each other or tell you where someone is strong and weak.”

It also contributes to a poor experience for the candidates themselves. Suddenly, the same person might get calls from multiple recruiters for the same role, unbeknownst to them. You then end up in a conflict between two agencies about who represents them. You might even lose that person altogether.