Published on Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008
Some recruiters are totally hung up on hiring criteria. They have fixed ideas not only about the ‘right’ candidate’s experience, performance, skills, academic background and attitude, but also the image and demeanour to go with it. They consider it imperative that the potential employee should meet all the requirements of the job description and some more too.
These seemingly ‘indispensable’ prerequisites can often drive the best hiring strategy askew. After all, there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ job candidate.
As you spend days uncovering the perfect employee for the job, you may be overlooking some of the best applicants. They will slip through your net as you concentrate on eliminating everything but the best. And when you dejectedly go back to the ‘almost-perfect’ candidates, they may either have accepted other positions or are no longer even interested in the job!
So, can you afford to keep waiting forever for the haloed candidate to emerge? And, even if the perfect candidate does exist, what is the assurance that he/she will take up the job that you are offering?
As a top retention strategist highlights, “It’s nice to strive for perfection when we hire, but this is easier said than done. It’s nice to have 100 percent, but hard to achieve. On a positive note, the 75 percent candidates can bring productive qualities and skills to your department that weren’t included in your requirements or detected in an interview. With a three-quarter selection approach, you may be much closer to 100 than you think.”
It has often been noticed that even before a company can get over revelling in the hire of a perfect employee, the said person is gone in a wink. Such star employees frequently try to leverage a good job for a similar title in an even bigger organisation.
Then again, there is another potential fallacy that the hiring standards itself may be wrong or invalid. But what if you are focusing on the wrong attributes in the quest for the perfect job candidate. After all, the perfect applicants will not always have the same background as you list in the job description.
It is high time that hiring managers step back and re-evaluate their quest for perfection. Try to make your standards consistent with reality. At least, steer clear of simply concentrating on the buzzwords and create a more practical profile of the ‘perfect candidate’.
Think – is it absolutely essential that your accounts manager should be the product of an ‘Ivy League’ school or you graphic designer must belong to a particular association?
Lowering your expectations will enable you to cast a wider net and incorporate good candidates who would otherwise have seemed ‘not quite right!’
While it makes sense to compile a list of all the attributes you want the candidate to possess, at least don’t hold on to the criteria very rigidly. When everything else bodes well, the candidate is quite acceptable even if his academic background is not quite right or he has a little lesser experience than assumed necessary!
So, do not adamantly insist on a prestigious degree or some specific level of experience. Try to determine whether the candidate is capable of accomplishing the tasks well even if he does not possess the exact skills or qualifications.
Shift the attention from seeking perfection and focus on finding motivated, ethical, experienced and competent candidates. Think in terms of what the candidate must be able to do to be successful in the job, not what he must have.
Concentrate on these four or five qualities and objectives required from an employee. This is called a performance profile.
Also, try to prioritise the list of ‘must-haves’ in an orderly fashion. After all, are communication skills more important than job abilities, smartness more important than diligence or image more important than passion for work?
This is not to suggest that companies should settle for mediocre candidates. But the bad news definitely is that there aren’t very many perfect candidates out there.
Yet, like it has been said, “While holding out for the perfect job candidate may be frustrating, time consuming, and costly, making a mistake in hiring can be disastrous!”
PAYAL CHANANIA
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