Job Seekers Went Mobile, and Left Small Employers Standing Still

Where do you think most job seekers begin their search for a new job? Most recruiters will tell you that candidates start by searching on the big job boards like Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder.

And those recruiters will be wrong.

Ten times more job seekers start their job search on Google than anywhere else.  (Update: I have not been able to verify this statistic elsewhere, and it clearly uses global information, not just the United States.)

Where do small employers post their jobs? When I ask HR managers where they post their open jobs, they usually rattle off a list of job boards. But they almost never mention Indeed. Yet three recent studies found Indeed to be the number one external source of hire for employers in the US.  (Not coincidentally, all three surveys were from companies that provide Applicant Tracking Systems that integrate seamlessly with Indeed: iCims, SilkRoad and Newton Software.)

How did that happen?

It’s simple, comScore research shows that two out of three searches of any kind originate on Google. And Google job searches often lead job seekers to Indeed. See for yourself. Type your own title and location into the Google search bar and see what comes up. The first few jobs you will see are probably posted on Indeed. Consequently, Indeed has three times more unique visitors per month than CareerBuilder (80 million vs 24 million). (UPDATE: In January Indeed had 100 million visitors)

But the bigger threat to small employers long term is not Google upending the job boards, it’s mobile and social.

According to comScore, more than one out of every three minutes spent online is now spent “beyond the PC” on smart phones and tablets. Already 30% of Indeed’s total candidate visits are mobile. They encourage it. Both Indeed and CareerBuilder have mobile apps that let candidates apply to jobs from their phones with minimal effort … as long as the employer enabled the mobile-apply functionality. But very few small employers make their job ads and career sites mobile friendly … because many small employers don’t have a career site.

In a 2012 study by potentialpark, 77% of recent college grads expect to see a company career site and 94% go on to say that in addition to the career site, employers should present themselves on at least one social or professional platform. 61% expect employers to have a Facebook career page, and more than half expect a company page on LinkedIn. And if you disappoint them, they will be vocal about their job search experiences. 92 percent say they discuss their job search experience with others, both in-person and through social media.

So let’s sum this up. Only 4% of job seekers start their job search with a specific company in mind. So if your ads are not in the right place to be seen, you won’t be considered. And if somehow candidates do see your ad, 34% will not apply if your application process is too much of a hassle. And if they do apply, and don’t enjoy the experience, they just might leave a bad review about your company on Glassdoor or Indeed, scaring off everyone else who might consider working for you. (I called this trend, “The Amazonification of Recruiting” in a post on The HR Examiner.)

Employers, this is your wake up call. In the past 3 years, almost everything you took for granted about job advertising has changed.

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(To see more research on recruiting, visit my online library of articles.)

DISCLOSURE: This is not an endorsement of any vendor. I am not paid by anyone mentioned in this post. I am however, a client of Careerbuilder, iCims and Indeed.

Hiring is Not Like Your Other Work

Hiring is not like your other work. In your other projects, customers notice every mistake and point it out. Every missed deadline gets the attention of upper management. Every failure has consequences.

But hiring is like operating in a sensory deprivation tank. You get no feedback at all for long stretches of time. Until the very end, when things often go disastrously wrong.

Let’s say you have an important job to fill. So you start recruiting and get a nice pipleline of qualified candidates going. You’re pleased, the interviews are going well. Life is good. A few quiet months go by and then it’s time to make a hiring decision.

And. then. everything. bogs. down.   

• One of your top candidates suddenly becomes really hard to schedule for a final interview so you had to hold things up until they could be scheduled. You could have chosen to proceed without them, but hey, nobody was complaining about the delay.
• Just when you are ready to make the job offer, you take that one last look at your budget. You start to worry about what the CFO will say, so you shave a few thousand dollars from the job offer. Nobody will give you a hard time about that, right?
• Then someone in HR has to draft an offer letter, but they are out sick and when they get back, your job offer is not their priority, so another week slips by. Hey, what are you going to do? Other things take priority over pushing out some paperwork, right?

And before you know it, weeks have blown past with you pinned to the wall, wasting time on unproductive delays. But hey, nobody complained, right?

Except your delays raised serious doubts in the mind of the candidate. They have started to ask themselves dark questions like, “Are they serious about me, or am I their second choice?” And, “Are they capable of making a decision over there?” And, ”If this is how they treat me now, how will be be after they start taking me for granted?” 

And, of course, you gave the candidate ample time to go get another job offer. So they reject your job offer to go work for someone who made them feel valued and important.

And suddenly you find that your failed hiring project is getting lots of uncomfortable management attention.

OK, so maybe hiring really is just like your other work. I guess I need a new title for this post.

Should You Run The Search Yourself?

A client called me to discuss a job opening at his firm. He’s very well connected, so naturally he was wondering if he should try recruiting on his own before engaging us to run the search. “Can you help me weigh the pros and cons of paying you a fee to do what I might be able to do on my own?”

It’s a fair question, and the answer is not as simple as you might expect.

Yes, search fees are expensive, but before running the search yourself, here are a few aspects of the recruiting process it’s easy to overlook:

Identifying candidates:

If you are considered “well connected” in your field, you are probably directly acquainted (1^st degree connection) with up to 20% of the potentially viable candidates for your job opening. But are you actually willing to open your rolodex, and aggressively recruit them? Is there anything that would prevent you from contacting some of the top people at your competitors (are you comfortable being perceived as a “raider?”)

Having the ability to identify candidates is only one part of the recruiting equation. The next step is to develop a compelling marketing message (beyond the job description). Messaging quality significantly impacts recruiting results—just emailing around a job description rarely does much to attract the top people.

Do you have time to reach out individually to top candidates?  “Jerry, I thought you might be interested in hearing about this position, and here’s why…”  We get most of our response on our second or third direct contact with a candidate. Successful, focused, busy people often ignore job board ads, don’t read generic newsletter job postings, and even brush off the first direct inquiry. Are you ready to be responsive when candidates express interest? You can’t recruit  people and then leave them hanging.

Evaluating candidates:

After the interview, how comfortable are you in rejecting the people you just went to the trouble of recruiting? it’s easy to reject a stranger who answered a job ad, but harder to reject someone you personally invited to interview.

If you are well-connected, you stand a fair chance of finding at least 2 or 3 qualified candidates on your own. Of course, if you are advertising your opening, you will also receive inquiries from hundreds of less qualified people … many of whom are connected to you through mutual acquaintances. Who will receive all those resumes; who will respond graciously to each one; who will keep your candidates informed of the hiring schedule; and who will send all the rejection letters? Beyond that sort of hiring administrivia, who is available to screen all the candidates against a uniform selection criteria, without showing favoritism?

Moving the Process Toward a Decision:

Finally, who is tasked with moving the hiring process forward to resolution? Hiring delays can be quite costly, but hiring often languishes behind other more urgent priorities. Driving the hiring process forward based upon fair selection criteria usually requires significant leadership focus. Indecision and perceived unfair handling of candidates reflects poorly on all involved.

When your ideal candidates are all connected to you in some way, these issues should be considered before you start the process. A significant number of our new searches come on the heels of a failed search conducted by a busy executive who had the best of intentions, but simply lacked the time to follow through on the search process all by himself.

A solid hiring process involves far more than simply knowing good people.

Want Better Hiring Results? Shift Your Perspective

“If we’re paying a search fee, then I expect to find someone who can really ‘wow’ me,” the Director told me in my morning meeting. “I’m not going to settle.”

Later than day I met with another client to discuss their new search. The COO was explaining her expectations, “I want to see qualified candidates from a variety of backgrounds, so we can compare them.” She outlined how her very stable team would benefit by including new people with diverse perspectives.

The simple act of paying a search fee dramatically raised the expectations of both hiring managers.

Think about that for a moment.

When you post an ad on a job board, you hope to get someone good.  That’s your hope, but you’ve learned not to expect much. When you “industrialize the hiring process” (like posting ads, letting HR process the responses, and only interviewing the people who happened to notice the ad, and who took the trouble to apply) your hiring managers know they should lower their expectations. And when you lower the caliber of people you hire, you are forced to spend more time managing average people.

Alternatively, when you invest more effort in your hiring process (either by investing in your internal recruiting process, or by engaging a search firm), you come to expect more .. so you end up hiring more exceptional people, and getting higher productivity with less management effort.  (Managing high performers is not easy, but it’s far less exhausting than managing low performers).

When you pay a search fee, you feel like your money would be wasted if you only saw people who were good–you want someone great. In fact, you don’t just want someone great, you want to know you hired the best possible person, so you expect to interview people from a variety of backgrounds. This diverse outside perspective helps prevent the kind of stale, insular mediocrity that follows the phrase “5-10 years of experience in our industry.”

So if you want better hires and more productivity with less management effort, shift your perspective. Invest in your hiring process. Trust in the fact that organizational commitment follows money–when you invest more money in recruiting, your managers will invest more energy getting the hiring exactly right.

Pause Before Plunging Into the Job Offer

The HR Director was irritated. “I told the candidate he could have a week to decide about our job offer,” she complained, “But the department really wants his answer sooner.” This candidate had first interviewed almost three months earlier, so after all that time, the Director felt like she was not in a position to deny the candidate some time to think it over.  Although I never recommend giving more than 2 days to decide on an offer, the real issue here is that the HR Director did not ask for what she really wanted (a fast decision) so she was left in limbo.

But not asking for what you want applies to both employers and candidates at every stage in the interview process. To make a nice first impression, people often indicate maximum flexibility at the beginning of the process:

• Candidates indicate they would consider a much lower salary than they really want.
• Employers indicate they have far more upward mobility, or workplace flexibility than they really want to offer.

Everyone plays nice at the outset. The courtship phase of recruiting is all good feelings about a mythical future with lots of bright possibility. But then as the hazy distant future comes into focus … things change. And when a job offer hits the table, reality comes right along with it, and everyone’s perspective instantly shifts. That sought-after candidate could take a week to schedule an interview, but once the job offer was on the table, well then, that employee was making his new boss wait a week for an answer … unconscionable.

I recommend you pause before you run from the warm sauna-like haze of the recruiting process and plunge into the ice cold water of job offer reality.

Once an offer is made:

• The hiring manager thinks, “This hiring process has taken far too long. Now I’m behind on my work. I need that employee to get here soon and hit the ground running!”
• The candidate/employee thinks, “Oh geez, this is real, now I have to decide. What have I gotten myself into? Is this job really any better than my current job? And, ugggghhh, now I have to give notice to my current job–and the thought of that makes me really uncomfortable.”

So before you make a job offer, before everything changes, while you are still in the warm sauna of the recruiting phase …. hit the pause button. Check in with your candidate. Have a conversation about your expectations, and theirs. “Hey Sally, we are seriously considering making you a job offer and wanted to check in with you on that. I know we initially discussed (whatever), are you still thinking along those lines?” And “Have you thought about what your current employer might do? Are you expecting a counter-offer? How do you plan to handle that?”

Just dip a toe in that water before you plunge in.

Catching Lying Job Seekers

Every few weeks some headline blares, “How to Catch Lying Job Seekers.” In the article, some self-proclaimed expert reveals the shocking statistics about how often job seekers lie on their resume. And the solution is usually to hire that very same expert to ferret out the truth for you. Otherwise you are a rube, a patsy … a stooge.

The whole “lying job seeker” meme makes my skin crawl.

We conduct over a 100 executive searches every year, interviewing thousands of people, and looking at over 50,000 candidate resumes and online profiles.  I cannot imagine anything more exhausting or counterproductive than reflexively distrusting all of them.

Call me naïve, but I just don’t think most people lie to deceive you–they just want to look good. It’s not malicious … it’s just what some people do. And you need not wrap yourself in some body armor of distrust just to to protect yourself.

Job seekers generally divide themselves into three groups.

• Some folks are pretty darn selective about their accomplishments, they shade their stories to look good, and they brag about stuff they were perhaps only tangentially involved with….but they don’t just do this on their resumes–they also do it at dinner parties. Some people are just braggarts, and you can easily interview them to suss out the truth. Problem solved.
• The second group is WYSIATI–what you see is all there is. They are plain spoken and tell it like it is. They make great employees. These people are sometimes called stalwart workers, but their resumes are pretty dull and easy to miss.
• The third group are folks are raised to be humble about their achievements, to give credit to others, to downplay their role in successes. These are the people who score a 96 on a test and obsess over the 4 points they missed. I call them the “A students.” And you probably didn’t even select them for an interview because their resume was less impressive than the braggarts. That’s why I think the Perfect (Resume) is the Enemy of the Good (Hiring Process). If you are not careful, you might end up selecting only braggart resumes to interview.  (Click the link and find out how one HR manager protects herself from that mistake.)

The risk of listening to the distrust fear mongers is that you will start to only see the bad in people and not the good. Going down this slippery slope, you begin to telegraph your distrust–and inject poison into what might have become a blossoming new relationship with a Stalwart, or an “A Student.” You just might find yourself  instilling doubt where there was none.  And then you really would be a rube.

The Smart Assumption to Make When Interviewing Candidates

The CEO called to tell us he was ready to extend a job offer to a COO candidate. “Offer her $185,000, but we have some room to go up from there if she doesn’t go for it.” His assumption was that the candidate would be comfortable negotiating and would ask for more if she wanted more.

Bad assumption.

The candidate was perfectly comfortable negotiating, but she was also comparing this offer to another offer she received that week to see who placed a higher value on her skills. She was using the offer as a signal of which firm would treat her better. By not leading with his best offer first, the CEO sent the message that his new COO would always have to negotiate for fair pay, instead of simply being paid the fair market rate.

The smart assumption to make when interviewing candidates is that the best people will receive multiple job offers at the fair market rate for their skills. 

When you make this smart assumption you won’t lose great candidates by:

• Low balling your job offer to make candidates negotiate up to a fair market rate
• Offering a salary based upon their last salary and not their fair market rate
• Dragging out your hiring process under the false illusion that you are the only game in town
• Making them come back to your office five times to meet five more people.

When you make this smart assumption you will:

• Put your best foot forward, and give the candidates a compelling reason to join your firm.
• Run an organized, predictable hiring process. You will let the candidate know where they stand at each step of the process, and you will not allow long delays between steps.
• Make your first job offer your best job offer–if you are going to be willing to offer a certain salary, or vacation schedule, or whatever–offer it right up front.

Employers Beware; Great Candidates Know Their Value

As the job market continues to improve in the Washington area, I’m seeing a trend. Great candidates know what they are worth on the job market, and they are not settling for less.

It’s not just that top people are receiving multiple job offers … although we are seeing plenty of that. It’s not just an increasing self confidence level that makes candidates more willing to ask for what they want …  although we are seeing plenty of that also.

No, the really interesting development is how well-informed candidates are. They really know, within a few thousand dollars, exactly what they are worth. That’s a long term shift that employers ignore at their peril. You simply must assume that both parties to the job offer have very similar information now–they know what you know.

As an employer, you simply cannot low-ball an offer by a few thousand and hope the candidate will fold–when you do that now, you only snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up with nothing.

The Franken-Candidate Dilemma

Jim had just interviewed six people and was giving us feedback on them, “I liked various aspects of all of them, but each one had a weakness in some area.” Jim told us he really wanted to find someone who combined each of their strengths. “I’d love to see someone with Jim’s enthusiasm and Lisa’s analytical skills,” he pondered that a moment then added, “Ideally they would also have Brooke’s subject matter expertise and Lauren’s curiosity.”

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Jim was fantasizing about creating some entirely new, entirely perfect candidate from an amalgamation of the best aspects of all the other candidates. I call it the “Franken-candidate dilemma.”

A similar problem occurs when you’ve had the privilege of working with someone truly remarkable. When they leave the organization, it’s easy to become fixated on finding someone with the exact same rare combination of skills, as in, “Find me someone just like Sally.” But you can waste months trying to find another receptionist with a flair for accounting, or another brilliant salesman who actually turns in his sales reports on time. Business owners often want to hire someone like themselves, when of course, people with those same entrepreneurial attributes are all busy starting their own companies … not looking for employment in yours.

The “Franken-candidate dilemma,” the “find me another Sally” fixation, and the “find me another me” approach all suffer from the exact same logical fallacy—overgeneralization. They all assume, “If there is one person like that, there must be many people like that.” And like Captain Ahab, hunting for the white whale can drive you mad.

So how do you know when it’s time to keep looking for more candidates, and when it’s time to choose from the candidate pool in front of you? It comes down to three factors:

1. What is the ongoing cost of leaving the position unfilled? There is a real cost to leaving most jobs open. Know what you are giving up by delaying the hire of someone new.
2. How likely is it that you will find your perfect Sally, ””Mini-Me,” or “Franken-candidate” in a reasonable period of time? (Ask yourself this question, “How many people like that have you ever met in your life?”) Are you doomed to spend several months in a potentially fruitless search for something that may not exist? And if you get lucky and somehow find another Sally, are they so rare that you will be held hostage to them because of the extraordinarily high cost of replacing them in the future? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to simply reorganize the work, so you no longer require your receptionist to handle accounting?
3. What, exactly are you giving up by “settling for” someone who lacks one of your desired attributes? How does that cost compare to the cost of leaving the job vacant for months?

High performing organizations usually do a terrific job of balancing these three factors–and here is how they do it. 

Still Waiting for the Response to your Job Offer?

After a lengthy search process, Kathy finally made a job offer. Because every other candidate had already been ruled out, Gerald was the last man standing. Kathy dearly hoped he would accept, she certainly did not want to start all over with the search.

At first Gerald was hard to reach, it took him 24 hours to get back to Kathy just so she could extend the offer (he was traveling). Then he asked for time to think it over, he was not specific about how much time he needed, and Kathy was reluctant to push the issue. Then almost a week later Gerald had a few questions about the benefits. Once he had that information, he made a counter-offer to get a bit more money (to offset the benefit costs), and he also wanted some more vacation time.  (Gerald’s negotiating playbook must have been the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”

And then, of course, almost two weeks later, Gerald turned down the offer.

My father-in-law often said “Deals that don’t happen quickly, usually don’t happen.” The longer I work in the executive search business, the more I value that advice. For any position below CEO, I suggest you give candidates no more than 2 days to accept your offer. Then withdraw it and move on.

Oh, and here is how to avoid getting into this situation in the first place….

Removing Bias (and Desperation) from Your Hiring Decisions

In a doomed attempt to save time, many hiring managers unwittingly make themselves both more desperate and more biased in their hiring decisions. When you prematurely narrow the number of candidates you are willing to interview, you set up the perfect storm for bias and desperation.  Here’s why.

The Washington DC metropolitan area has a great job market. As I said in The Washington Business Journal,  job seekers have the upper hand again. Mid-career professionals often receive multiple job offers and can afford to be choosy. This means that candidates who do well in their first interview with you often withdraw from consideration before you’ve even had time to schedule their second interview.

So, if you have not started your first round interviews with a field of at least six highly qualified candidates, you will probably find yourself coming down to the wire with only one viable candidate. That makes your hiring decision both simple and dangerously flawed. When you only have one person, your choice is either a) hire, or b) don’t hire. Really, the choice is a) continue doing two jobs, or b) get help from someone. So naturally most hiring managers a) decide to hire now, and b) live to regret it later.

A recent study suggests why you make better decisions by improving your frame of reference. Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet explains it this way:

“Our hunch is that the mechanism works something along the following lines: if you look at one pair of shoes, it’s hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes. You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pairs of shoes available, you’re much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes.”

The Harvard study showed promising results in removing gender bias from hiring and promotion decisions, but the frame of reference principle applies equally well to other aspects of hiring, such as evaluating the competencies and cultural fit of the candidate.

Don’t set yourself up to make a bad decision. Do what it takes to assemble a robust slate of qualified candidates, you won’t regret it.

Pre-Employment Testing and Human Sacrifice

If you think the era of human sacrifice is over, think again. Humans are sacrificed every day on the altar of pre-employment testing. Hey, I’m not saying that all pre-employment tests are uniformly bad, I’m making the far more reasonable argument that most small organizations who rely on testing are worshiping a false god. (There, see? Wasn’t that less incendiary?)

To know me is to know that I am a recruiting process geek. We track dozens of metrics on every stage of our search process. We track the retention rate of our placements for three full years. And we focus intently on doing everything we can to improve the results we get for our clients (i.e. faster searches, with more qualified candidates who will drive business results, and stick around long enough to make a meaningful impact).

So naturally, people assume I’m a fan of pre-employment testing because it just sounds so scientific and process oriented. Except in my experience, most small organizations are actually harmed by their pre-employment assessments. Rather than improving hiring results, the testing actually gets in the way.

It’s not always the tests themselves that cause the problem (well, OK, sometimes they do). The issue is how managers behave around the tests:

• Some managers overtly surrender to the test. “Well I liked Candidate A, but the test won’t let me hire him.” (Managers idolize the test, Like “The Claw” in Toy Story, it alone determines “who will stay and who will go.”)

• Some managers covertly surrender to the test using the politically correct language. “Well, after the interview I preferred Candidate A, and admittedly the test is only one component of our assessment, but after seeing his score, I’ve now decided that Candidate B is my preference.” (Managers generally don’t want to stick their neck out and take full responsibility for the hire. So when they pick the candidate who scored well, at least they have political cover if the person later fails.)
• Some managers abdicate completely and just let the test select who they even interview. These managers cut short their own interview process, figuring they should not waste time interviewing if they are only going to hire people who pass the test. I’ve heard of first interviews as short as 15 minutes and then going straight to testing. (See “The Claw” above).

If you want to undercut your managers, and make them doubt their own interviewing ability … introduce a pre-employment assessment. If you want to make managers feel less responsible for who they hire … introduce a pre-employment assessment. But if you want to discover factors about a candidate that will cause them to become top performers in your culture, tread carefully. Personality traits that are correlated with high performance do not necessarily cause it.

“Anyone can compare two sets of numbers and tell you whether they correlate, but, it takes careful study to know whether A actually leads to B. For example, skirts and stock markets tend to move up and down together, beach ice cream sales and shark attacks tend to move together, and watermelon sales and temperature move together. But, skirts do not cause the market to change, sharks do not buy ice cream, and selling watermelon does not cause it to be hot.”  Dr. Wendell Williams on ERE

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Note to people (and trolls) who want to comment:

This is not my first rodeo in social media.

• I know some testing vendors will want to hawk their products here. Let me stipulate for the record that of course you are the exception. I’m talking about everyone else, of course … and please don’t call me, this post was not an RFP.
• I know some big organizations are saying that you’ve validated your test and trained your managers. Congratulations, I’m not talking about what GE can afford to do, I’m talking about small organizations.
• But hey, if you work in a small organization and have a different experience, then please comment and teach me something. As long as I get to learn something, I really don’t mind being proven wrong.
• Oh, and if you agree, please comment, I’m always happy to take a big slice of that.

Interviews are 80% Performance Art

Imagine you are hiring for a key position.

A good looking, well dressed candidate confidently walks in on time, smiles, looks you in the eye and warmly shakes your hand. You exchange pleasantries for a few moments and you can feel yourself beginning to relax.

You think “Oh good, they seem like a great candidate!” So you might be tempted to begin talking more. You know, to get them interested in the job.

Except, of course, you don’t know a thing about them yet.

Interviewing is full of traps like these.

• We’re drawn to good looking resumes that fit our mental picture of what the resume should look like (regardless of who actually wrote that resume, or whether people from other backgrounds might be more qualified).
• We’re seduced by appearances in the interview (regardless of the fact that interviewing ability does not predict anything about the candidate’s ability to do the job).
• We’re most comfortable with people who are “like us” even though teams are strengthened by diversity.

Traditional interviews are 80% theatrics (performance art) and 20% substance–your instincts will routinely fail you unless you methodically guard against your unconscious biases. Don’t wing it.

Skilled researchers pored through 85 years of scientific literature to identify which employee selection methods were the best predictors of job performance, and they distilled it down to a few things anyone can do.

They Can Wait a Week, Right?

Client says to me,  ”Hey I like Bill and want to make him a job offer but it’s going to take some time to pull it together. He knows we’re busy and he’s working now, so he won’t mind waiting a week, right?”

No, Bill won’t mind a bit. He’ll just have a week longer to get a promotion in his current job, or to get another offer from one of your competitors. So as long as you don’t mind losing him, take all the time you need….

And hey, when you do get around to making Bill that job offer, you won’t mind waiting around for a week or so until he gets back to you, right? (Hmmm, suddenly that week feels like quite a long time doesn’t it?)

Time passes very quickly when you are in control and someone else is waiting for you. A week passes and it feels like a day. But when you are not in control, and you are waiting for someone else, every day feels like a week.

Remember, at job offer time, every day they wait is pure agony for your new hire.

Your Obligation to Hire the Most Qualified Person

You are a good person. You are tolerant of many viewpoints and you want a diverse team that is reflective of your clients and the community you work within. You know it only makes your team stronger.

But when you are hiring, your senior obligation is not to round out your team, it is to hire the most qualified person you can find, regardless of their background. You may have the desire to add someone with a certain kind of background or credential to your team (“we need an MBA around here”). Or perhaps your organization has too many men, or women or whatever. Of course your candidate sourcing and recruiting efforts should make every effort to draw from a diverse candidate pool–anything less is stupid and short-sighted. But when it comes time to interview, after you’ve done your level-best to recruit wisely, your obligation is to consider every single qualified person.

It’s a mistake to allow hiring managers to cherry-pick resumes, only interviewing the people who meet certain criteria unrelated to job performance. Too many hiring managers forget the real priority in hiring. It’s hard enough to hire great people, and when you artificially limit your candidate pool (to consider only people with an MBA for example), you’ve done your organization a real disservice.

You owe it to all your other employees to hire the most qualified person–everyone’s livelihood depends on it. Before you make a hiring decision, take a few hours to be sure you have interviewed all the best candidates. By doing this, you will understand exactly what you are giving up when you insist on any hiring criteria that is unrelated to job performance.