HR Mistakes

Mistakes are a regular part of making day-to-day business decisions. However, when it comes to human resources management, it’s better to avoid them in the first place.

Human resources departments play a significant role in every organization. Therefore, making mistakes can turn out to be quite costly there, leading to serious consequences, particularly for small businesses.

HR Mistakes

Here we will take a look at the five most common, yet grave mistakes that small businesses, regardless of the nature of their nature must avoid at all cost when hiring new employees.

  1. Ignoring Employment Laws

As an employer, it’s your responsibility to be well aware of all employment laws and stay well abreast of any changes. If you don’t have good knowledge regarding employment laws in your country you can get into different troubles. You might be inviting penalties and lawsuits, which will not only harm you financially but also damage your reputation. Employment laws generally include areas related to safety protocol, discrimination, harassment, employee work hours and others.

It’s all-important to go through all employment laws that apply to the nature of your business and avoid situations where you have to face serious financial penalties and reputation damage.

  1. Not Screening Candidates Properly

As an employer, you need to make sure that you properly screen the candidate before hiring him for a position. By not doing that, you not only waste your time and money, but you often lead to hiring the wrong person for the job. Prior to inviting someone for the interview make sure that you have properly screened the candidate’s credentials. It would be done through a phone call. This is often one mistake closely associated with small businesses which often lack in giving importance to the candidate screening process.

  1. Ineffective Boarding

For employers to get their new hires start-out on the right foot. It’s important for them to pass them through an effective and efficient onboarding process. However, many small businesses often miss out on this important aspect of the hiring process and don’t arrange adequate orientation programs for their new hires. This often leads to ambiguity and confusions in many employees. Instead, employees must conduct a session where new hires must be given an opportunity to ask questions to clear any discrepancies and learn about different employee support tools of the company.

  1. Asking Irrelevant and Unacceptable Interview Questions

In the interest to know a candidate in a better way, it’s fine to ask them different questions. This helps in choosing the perfect candidate for the vacant position in your company. However, keep in mind asking irrelevant and unacceptable questions that have nothing to do with the hiring process.

Questions related to a candidate’s ethnicity, religion or race is not permitted. Therefore, it’s better to stick with only professional questions and avoid ones that could be deemed as discriminatory.

  1. Not Providing Proper Training

Many small businesses consider training as an additional expense. That is why they avoid training their employees before putting them to the working field. This turns out to be a poor approach in many cases. Not only employees find it hard to adjust with different tools necessary for their everyday working operations, but employers also don’t get the results they expect from them.

Workplaces are somewhat different from one another, and so the work practices. New hires must be given the right training to thoroughly understand the company’s work operations and its business practices. In addition, investing in employees reduces chances of errors in different projects, hence results in higher productivity at work.

Author Bio:

Kirsten Pike is the writer of this post. She is a professional academic writer at 6 Pound Essay | Essay Writing Service. Where she assists students in submitting top quality academic papers on a wide array of academic disciplines. As a blogger, she likes to write on areas related to employee training and development, business growth and entrepreneurship. Nowadays, she is researching in HR related areas to help enhance the hiring process.