An improving economy has been cause for celebration, but one side effect that recruiters are less likely to celebrate is the increased competitiveness for quality candidates. In a more competitive recruiting environment, it’s crucial to avoid mistakes, which can derail an already difficult process. Here are six common recruiting mistakes, and how you can fix them. 1. Not nailing down the job description. The job description communicates to everyone—applicants, recruiters and executives—what is needed to fill an open position. Without a dead-on accurate job description, you won’t be very likely to find the candidate you need, and your chances of satisfying the hiring need are lowered. Nailing down the job description should be the first step in any recruiting process, even before mining talent pools, posting the position, or defining interview questions you want to ask. Template: Creating Ideal Candidate Personas – Our free persona template will help you improve your talent acquisition by identifying who your ideal candidates are and how best to reach them. 2. Holding out for the “perfect candidate.” Everyone knows deep down that there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate, but that hasn’t stopped many recruiters and hiring teams from holding a position open for far too long in order to look for one. Observing a time frame for recruiting will help get everyone on board with choosing the best possible candidate within that time period so that the company can move on from there. 3. Failing to prepare candidates for the interview process. Preparing candidates for an interview can include providing background on the company, insider information on expectations and culture, and a timeline of the recruiting and hiring process itself. Unprepared candidates not only may underperform during the interview, but can also waste valuable interviewing time getting brought up to speed instead of being able to demonstrate their skills and experience. 4. Not assessing candidates outside the interview. Let’s face it—it’s way too easy for candidates to make themselves sound better and more qualified than they really are during an interview. Some interviewers are better than others at spotting less-than-honest answers, but even the best interviewers can get fooled by a skilled exaggerator at times. Fortunately, all kinds of assessments are now available to recruiters, from online personality or skills tests to in-person exercises in which candidates are given the opportunity to solve a problem or develop a plan that will help show their actual skills. 5. Letting communication with short list candidates lapse. Ongoing communication with short list candidates may not seem as important as other recruiting tasks, but lapsed communication could mean that a candidate has moved on by the time the company signals that they want to make an offer. Thrive TRM sets automatic updates and communications with candidates to avoid this problem with minimal hands-on time. 6. Spending the bulk of recruiting time on routine tasks. Besides a regular communication routine, scheduling, reporting, and other administrative tasks can fill up a recruiter’s schedule and take time away from more important priorities like developing talent pools. Thrive TRM speeds up and even automates many of these routine tasks so that you can strike a better balance, making the entire recruiting and hiring process faster and more effective.