Why You Should Stop Hunting For the Perfect Candidate and Hire a Real Person

Finding perfection takes time. Assuming that is, that you even believe in perfection, let alone that you have the resources, bandwidth and ability to identify it once the approximate article comes within range.

The problem is that our ever-greater dependence on technology and the data it spawns like hatchlings has led organizations to convince themselves that they can take the uncertainty out of hiring. As if.

Why we find an algorithm more trustworthy than our own judgment and the innate senses that got us where we are is an interesting statement about those carefully nurtured capabilities. But the larger question may be why - when technology and globalization are pushing us to move faster while reducing risk entirely - we think that making job qualifications ever more specific will somehow eliminate idiosyncratic personalities, capabilities and sensibilities, thereby producing the optimal human solution. JL 


Liz Ryan comments in Forbes:

Hiring systems are set up to reward docility - the very things you don’t need in your employees. Anyone who would sit by the phone waiting to get your call eight or ten weeks after they applied for a job is not someone who can move your business into the future. Too many managers screen resumes out because someone didn’t have a job with “Marketing” in its title for long enough, or because they were missing one keyword in their resume.
We advise our CEO clients to give their firm’s managers 45 days to hire a new employee.
If you’re going to ask your leadership team for the funding to hire a new person, shouldn’t that new hire become your top priority until the new arrival is on board? You would think so, but that’s often not the way it works in real life.
A manager gets the approval to hire someone, and they scramble to get their job requisition to HR so that someone can publish a job ad. Then molasses seeps into the recruiting process and everything slows down.
Job applicants can wait weeks to hear anything back after completing an online application, or even after a face-to-face job interview!
We tell our clients to let their department managers know that any job that remains unfilled after 45 days (barring emergency or illness) goes on hold for at least six months.
If the need for more help on the team isn’t a high enough priority to warrant a manager’s time and attention, then the money allocated for the new hire’s salary can go to a better cause!
Managers would learn in a hurry to speed up their recruiting pipelines if every CEO followed this advice.
It’s foolish for corporate, startup and institutional leaders to spend months looking for the perfect candidate when there are wonderfully qualified, smart and capable people everywhere.
Too many HR screeners and hiring managers emphasize very specific kinds of experience in their hiring decisions. They screen resumes out of the pack for the stupidest reasons — because someone didn’t have a job with “Marketing” in its title for quite long enough, or because they were missing one keyword in their resume.
That’s crazy! We hurt our companies, our shareholders, our customers and ourselves when we recruit in such a bone-headed way.
A smart person with very different experience- gained outside your function and/or industry – can always figure out how to do the job.
If you think that knowing your specific weenie jargon will help a person perform more effectively in the job, you haven’t spent enough time around smart and inquisitive people!
These days every organization needs people who can think creatively and solve problems on the fly.
They need people who have altitude on their own lives and careers and who come to work because it’s fun and interesting, not just because it pays the bills.
Yet our hiring systems are set up to reward docility and sheepiness (the very things you don’t need in your employees!) in their timing alone.
Anyone who would sit by the phone waiting to get your call eight or ten weeks after they applied for a job in your company is not someone who can move your business into the future.
If you have a voice in your organization’s hiring process and/or control the purse strings, make a note: January 1, 2016 is the perfect date to apply the Use it or Lose It standard to the job-requisition-approval process.
If your managers have become complacent about pushing a recruiting project through to a job offer (or if your gummy HR processes are the culprit) this is the perfect time to fix those problems.