Let your goal be your guide.
Lines outside your door can be a good thing when it comes to recruiting. If you need warm bodies to fill positions such dishwashers or cashiers, or you’re hiring a lot of seasonal help, you can advertise the position on job boards or your website and expect to get a big response. You’ll have lots of applicants to choose from. Your hiring decision will be quick, easy and cheap – it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to find readily available, local candidates, the interview process and hiring decision will be simple and made by one person or just a few people from your organization, and long-term fit is not paramount since turnover in these positions is expected.
But if you’re hiring for the C-suite or other positions that require high-level skills and competencies, experience and fit are critical. You’re not looking for just anyone, you’re looking for the right one. Odds are that someone who looks right on paper, or on LinkedIn, might not look so good in person.
After all, time is money and money is money. It might feel good at first to think you have a long line of qualified candidates. But the feeling fades quickly once you’ve incurred thousands of dollars on candidates’ travel expenses, and spent many of your senior people’s precious hours interviewing instead of moving the business ahead, only to conclude the candidates were mediocre. You’ve wasted time and money. You aren’t any closer to filling that important position and you have to go through the whole process again.
Mediocrity is everywhere. And it is very, very frustrating.
As Lou Adler writes for SHRM.org, a great hire:
- Exceeds expectations
- Consistently delivers results
- Doesn’t make excuses
- Doesn’t need a lot of direction or coaching
- Self-motivated to do the work required
You don’t need more candidates to interview, you need better candidates. How do you find the right ones? It’s not through culling through a lot of quantity and having high hopes. The key to having fewer candidates, all high-quality candidates, is to know precisely who you are looking for. Internally, you must agree on the skill set needed. That’s the resume part: reading the lines. But then there’s that all-important fit component that is critical to the long-term success of any hire. Assessment of fit requires finesse: reading between the lines.
And that’s why it’s important to source your search with the right recruiter. One that helps facilitate a formal, structured discussion to develop an agreed-upon candidate profile that outlines the required skills and experience for the position. But more than that, you need a recruiter that understands your cultural norms and nuances. One with years of experience asking the kinds of candidate screening questions that will elicit meaningful insights instead of pat answers. One with research and expertise in all verticals. One that treats every search as unique and is committed to finding you the quality candidate that you need. Mankuta l Gallagher.