My old boss told me: “If you hang around the night club until past midnight, waiting and waiting for that spectacular love-at-first-sight individual who would sweep you off your feet, you would most likely end up going home alone “.
In any hire, you must find a good balance, and make a trade-off if necessary, between three things; they are:
- The time you have before someone must be in the job.
- The quality of the candidate and to which extent it’s good enough.
- The cost of compensation demanded by the candidate vs. how much you can afford to pay.
It’s always a trade-off between time, quality, and cost.
You cannot hire people who do not want to be hired. It’s an old research, but my guru Lou Adler and even LinkedIn claim that some 80% of the candidate pool is not actively looking for a job. The balance of 20% will include many new graduates who by definition are active job seekers. You guess how many are left, who will read your job board advertisement or ready to talk to a contingency recruitment company.
I know of companies who have been on the hunt for six to 12 months, hunting through job boards or a group of recruitment agencies, for that perfect elusive and new Einstein candidate. I mean, has anyone thought of asking why an organization can function without such person for that period of time? You must question if you actually need to fill the position, if your business is running well without.
Year after year, organizations toss enormous amounts of cash at finding the ‘perfect candidate,’ and because they are holding out for the ‘perfect’ hire that never comes, sadly many positions remain unfilled for a long period and this affects business and business plans. Hence, the ‘best hire’ myth becomes a problem for them and costs the company money.
But the reality is far from that: the perfect hire doesn’t exist. It’s almost a myth. In reality, a company can only hire the ‘best’ that is available on the market – in a pool of interested candidates, not the best available in the industry. And if that person even exists, he or she is, of course, already happily employed. Only a tiny percentage of companies have enough money and interesting projects that could convince the best people in their field to work for them.
