Recognizing the Right Candidate

Recognizing when you’ve found the right candidate is one of the major hurdles when it comes to hiring the right talent for your company. Many companies have problems when it comes to choosing the right candidates in a timely manner, leading to serious problems and lengthy time to hire.

That’s why it’s so important to know when you’ve found the right candidate and be able to move quickly once you’ve found them. Good talent is the number one competitive advantage an organization can have. Finding the right talent quickly can give your company an edge over the competition.

This article will go over some of the problems that come up when companies try to find the right candidates, as well as what you can do to improve the situation. To start out, we’ll talk about one of the biggest problems keeping organizations from the top candidates: death by interview.

Death by Interview

Death by interview is one of the major problems that holds companies back from successful hiring. It happens when companies hesitate to make hiring decisions, so they end up putting candidates through a long series of interviews before circumstances force them to make a final decision.

This lengthy interview process creates a lot of problems for the candidates, leading to lower quality hires in the long term. A good candidate may become frustrated after being asked to go through a series of six, eight, or even a dozen interviews without receiving a hiring decision. The candidates most worth hiring are least likely to put up with a long interview process because they’re likely to receive offers from other companies in the meantime.

This means a long interview process almost guarantees a low-quality hire, but it also means the candidate you eventually hire may have some resentment of the company. By reducing candidate goodwill and lowering the quality of hires, death by interview can create a lot of problems.

Let’s talk about solutions to the death by interview problem. As you’ll see, the main thing in solving the death by interview problem is knowing when you’ve found a candidate you can accept.

Avoiding Death by Interview

• Understand What Personality You’re Looking For

Cultural fit is an important part of any hiring process. But many organizations just think of cultural fit as something where a candidate needs to fit in with organizational values. Shared values are important, of course, but they aren’t the most important thing to keep in mind when looking for cultural fit.

What’s the most important thing? Making sure the new hire has the right personality for the workplace he or she will be working in.

Let’s say you find a candidate who is perfect on paper. All the right skills, all the right qualifications, and all the right recommendations from high-level employers. You might think you should swoop in and grab them before anybody else gets them.

But let’s not be so hasty. Maybe the candidate has a work style or personality type that would generate a lot of friction in the office they’ll be working in. If the candidate is an independent type and the manager of the office in question has a short fuse, for example, you might be setting yourself up for trouble if you hire them. No matter what their qualifications.

That’s why it’s important to take the time to get to know the type of personality who would be the best fit for the work environment.

• Identify Ideal and Acceptable Requirements

One of the major causes of the “death by interview” problem is that companies are so caught up in the idea of hiring a perfect candidate that they won’t hire a good candidate until it’s too late. They’re so worried they might make the wrong decision that they end up not deciding until they’re forced to.

It’s important to know what the ideal candidate looks like, of course. So, by all means, you should know what skills, qualifications, and personality features a candidate would ideally have. But it’s also important to be realistic about the hiring process. The odds are that the ideal candidate doesn’t exist, or isn’t looking for a job right now, or would take so long to find that your company would lose money if you held out that long.

That means it’s important to know what an acceptable candidate looks like. Now, an acceptable candidate is still very much a qualified candidate. It’s just that you need to know what kind of candidate you could reasonably expect to be able to find on the job market. And once you have those acceptable requirements identified, you’ll be able to go ahead and hire the right candidate for the position in a timely manner.

• Talk to a Recruiter You Can Trust

Let’s face it: sometimes the hiring process is easier if you can have someone else take care of the early stages. With the right recruiter, you can have a trusted advisor to help you identify what you need in a candidate and what you can accept in a new hire.

Not all recruiters are created equally. Some of them are just interested in finding a body to fill a chair and aren’t really interested in finding the right candidate for you. But some of them want to partner with you and help your organization find the best talent now and into the future.

When you find a recruiter you can depend on, you can have help in determining what kind of talent you can reasonably expect to find on the market. You can have a reliable source of candidates who meet your requirements, cutting down the time to hire and saving your company money.

Not every recruiter is interested in a long-term partnership, but if you find one who is you’ve found something rare and valuable. Talk to a recruiter you can trust, get past the death by interview problem, and make sure you have a partner ensuring quality talent in the future.