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Are you constantly having to hire new employees? Do your new recruits repeatedly let you down?

It’s easy to blame your employees for the problem. You may have even resigned to the idea that there are no good applicants out there and that all the best employees are taken. This is complete nonsense of course – there are applicants out there that are a perfect match for your business.

So why haven’t you found them yet? Perhaps you’re simply not using the right recruitment strategies. Perhaps you have already found them and hired them in the past, but you’ve scared them away.

In other words, you could be to blame for the lack of reliable staff. By improving your recruitment process and ensuring that your workplace is a good environment to work in, you can start hiring the best employees for the job and keeping them. Here are just a few mistakes to correct in order to improve the quality of your workforce.

You’re only advertising on job listing sites

It could be a case that you legitimately aren’t finding the right applicants for the role because you’re not looking in the right places. Many employees tend to put an advertisement up on Indeed or Monster and then hope for the best. Whilst many jobseekers use these job listing sites and they are a good place to advertise, they’re definitely not the only place you should look.

By casting your net a little wider you could attract more applicants – this potentially gives you a better choice of candidates. The most resourceful and pro-active jobseekers tend not to just rely on job listing sites and may use social media to look for jobs as well as attending job fairs and getting help from recruitment agencies. Consider using some of these other forms of job advertising – post adverts on social media, try attending job fairs and team up with recruitment agencies.    

Your adverts focus wholly on what you want and not what you can give

The wording of your adverts could also be scaring away some of the better applicants. A lot of employers make the mistake of making their adverts sound too demanding by only listing what they want from the employer and not what they can give. Whilst you should list requirements such as qualifications and personality traits to weed out inappropriate applicants, you should also list some of the benefits of working for your business such as good pay, free lunches, a company car or simply a friendly working atmosphere.

The best quality applicants know that they can get pretty much any job they want if they put their mind to it. As a result, such applicants look for jobs that can offer them something in return – they know that they’re qualified enough and aren’t interested in meeting requirements. Make sure that you’re appealing to these types of applicants by advertising the perks of the roles you’re offering.

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You’re rushing the recruitment process

Some employers are too eager to fill a vacancy and end up rushing the recruitment process. This can often lead to an unsuitable applicant getting hired. The longer you advertise, the more applications you’ll get and the greater range of candidates you’ll then have to choose from. It’s also important to have enough time for reading these applications, as well as allowing enough time to conduct thorough interviews.

A week is not enough – ideally you want to leave a month to conduct the entire recruitment process. Whilst you may desperately need to fill a position, you should try your best to cope with the staff shortage during this period – a month of struggling is better than hiring the wrong applicant and being back in the same situation in a few week’s time because they quit or were fired. Temp staff should be viewed as a fall-back option in emergencies, allowing you to fill the vacancy until a more permanent and suitable staff member is found.

You’re not screening applicants

Failing to have a screening process in place could also result in you hiring the wrong candidates. It’s not uncommon for people to lie in order to get a job. Doing some background checks can help you to catch out these dishonest employees and prevent you from hiring someone who may not be qualified.

An ID check could be one of the most fundamental checks in order to ensure that you’re not hiring a fraudster. This could include using tools like facial recognition and document scanning to check that the applicant is who they say they are. You can also do criminal background checks to ensure that they haven’t been convicted of a crime in the past that could make them a danger to your business or your customers. A credit check meanwhile could give you an idea of their financial stability and whether they’ve had a consistent income in the past, whilst asking for references from past employers can ensure that they’re the type of employee to leave on good terms. You can even look up your applicants on Facebook and Twitter to get a more intimate idea of their character – a lot of employers are now doing this as a precaution.

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You’re not training your employees

When it comes to preventing new recruits from leaving early, offering training can be one way to reduce this. Training can help to ease employees into the role. Even if you’re looking for an experienced applicant for a high level role, it’s worth offering some training simply to familiarise them with your way of doing things – every company has its own method of organising things and its own security/health and safety protocol. Throwing new employees into the deep end and letting them adjust themselves often just makes employees feel undervalued.

Finding the time to train new recruits can be difficult. You may want to sacrifice some time out of usual working hours if you feel that you’re too busy during the day. Alternatively, you could delegate the task of training to a senior member of staff. Some companies also use e-learning, which is essentially digital training via software or an online guide. You shouldn’t rely wholly on e-learning, however it could allow you to reduce the amount of in-person training.

Your workplace is a toxic environment

Another reason that new recruits may be leaving so soon or simply underperforming could be due to the work environment. It’s possible that the environment is toxic and that new recruits are become immediately demotivated. If your staff are generally happy, then this is unlikely to be the case. However, if you’ve noticed that there’s a lot of negativity in the atmosphere, this could be to blame for you lack of loyal/competent new recruits.

There are so many ways in which a work environment can be toxic. It could be that your other employees are creating a negative atmosphere for new recruits by ignoring them, bullying them or simply spreading rumours and negative gossip – this could be a sign that you need to invest some time into team building as well as disciplining toxic employees. Alternatively, it could be your attitude and style of leadership that is demotivating new employees. This is never something easy to admit – you’ll know that this is the case if you don’t get on with your employees or if you feel that there’s a tension in the air. Taking a course in leadership and then trying to reconnect with your employees could solve this.

Poor regard for employee comfort and health & safety can also make a work environment toxic. If employees are having to work long hours with minimal rest, you’re likely to find people becoming demotivated. Your employees may not feel that their wellbeing is being taken into account and may feel that the job is bad for their health.

Only by removing this toxicity from the environment will you be able to attract loyal employees. Some jobs are impossible to love due to the nature of the work, but they can be tolerable if everybody gets along and there’s enough welfare measures in place.