5 Tips for Avoiding Early-Year Hiring Mistakes
Consider the following hiring and onboarding best practices to set up your team, and organization, for a successful year of hiring.
Kicking off a new year can be exciting, especially in terms of workforce growth and hiring strategies. But mistakes like misalignment around technology, continuing outdated manual workflows, poor communication practices, and background screening shortcomings are all possible. Consider the following tips to help avoid mistakes like these and set yourself, your team, and your organization up for hiring success in the new year.
Tip 1: Ensure Alignment Around the Introduction of AI in Processes
Our 2025 Global Benchmark Report explores the growing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in talent acquisition and workforce management. AI has the potential to speed up hiring lifecycles which can bring a variety of benefits. But it’s important to understand how bias and errors can multiply fast.
Introducing AI can start by defining its role clearly, keeping humans in the loop, testing, and remembering to blend efficiency with accountability.
Tip 2: Implement Strong Automations
From interview scheduling to background screen invites talent acquisition teams are responsible for completing a variety of tasks within programs like applicant tracking systems (ATS). This can be especially time consuming when the team is managing a high volume of internal hiring requests.
Standardizing your workflows with the help of custom automation can help reduce the time spent completing repetitive tasks. For example, a solution like HireRight’s Adjudication services can help to simplify the review of candidate screening reports, allowing recruiters to speed up their time-to-hire, streamlining hiring decisions by decreasing the number of reports requiring additional review.
This can help reduce manual data entry and subsequent human errors from team members. This will also reduce time spent on since-automated tasks and can directly impact the average timeframe of a candidate being identified, screened, and confirmed ready to work.
Tip 3: Keep Compliance in Mind When Growing
Workforce growth, especially on a global scale, can be exciting. But expanding team members into new territories with regional differences requires compliance teams to balance global consistency and local flexibility. Driving accuracy in background screening is a critical safeguard when reducing risks around compliance.
With stricter global regulations, evolving workforce models, and regional differences, compliance leaders face ever-increasing complexity. In fact, 34% of employers say managing global compliance is harder than ever.
Tip 4: Consider Ongoing Monitoring
Workforce monitoring services can provide timely alerts and additional information that help organizations verify their workforce continues to meet their requirements throughout employment. HireRight’s U.S. post-hire monitoring solutions include arrest records, sex offender registries, criminal records, sanctions, prohibited parties, and eligible professional licenses.
After your team has spent valuable time identifying and onboarding suitable candidates, implementing a ongoing monitoring program can help mitigate post-hire risks and protect the safety of employees, customers, patients, and your company’s reputation.
Tip 5: Don’t Ghost
Candidate ghosting, and the issue of non-responsiveness, is an unfortunate trend in the hiring landscape. Ghosting isn’t a one-way street, meaning recruiters and talent acquisition teams are also doing the ghosting. This can be delayed responses to job applicants or no follow-up from phone screens or interviews.
Encourage your talent acquisition team to start the year off with good habits around candidate communication. This can mean setting communication expectations early on, promoting honesty, and trying to minimize the time candidates must wait between interview rounds. Good, or bad, habits around candidate communication can directly affect your existing talent pool and reputation.
2026 can be a year of recruiting, talent acquisition, and compliance wins for your organization. Rolling out new technologies, improving workflows to save time, implementing compliance safeguards, and prioritizing candidate experience are all ways to help kick start those wins. Keep tips like these in mind to help set your organization up for hiring successes in the new year.
Release Date: January 20, 2026
HireRight
HireRight is a leading provider of on-demand employment background checks, drug and health screening, and electronic Form I-9 and E-Verify solutions that help employers automate, manage and control background screening and related programs.