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One of the lingering effects of the recession is employers are more cautious when making hiring decisions. Many are still holding out hope they’ll land the rarest of recruits: a “Purple Squirrel.”
Purple Squirrels are in a different league than A-players. They are people like Tony Fadell, who created the MP3 player at Sony, before he was recruited by Apple to design the iPod.
Apple calculates the performance of these star players at 25 times that of an average hire. Google estimates they are worth 300 regular staffers.
They are pioneers, innovators and extremely difficult to recruit. Even superstar A-players can involve a lot of legwork to track down and entice to switch employers. Every hiring manager wants to recruit that perfect candidate, someone who makes all the searching and work worth it. An employee, your boss, will reward you for finding.
The problem is this approach involves a high opportunity cost, as well as an ongoing bottom line cost to the business when a key position remains open.
Maintaining these continual drags on your productivity benefits no one, reducing the ROI you may get if you do manage to find that “perfect candidate.” This isn’t to say that you should hire just anyone, but letting go of this solves-all-problems slam dunk is better for all concerned.
Here are a few ways you can learn to move past the perfect candidate ideal.
- Stop worrying about cost-of-hire.
This might sound counterintuitive, but the role of recruitment is to optimise talent. You can’t do that when you are worrying about cutting costs. Shortcuts will be made which could harm the talent pool and efforts you take to find the right – rather than the perfect – candidate.
When San Francisco State University professor of management Dr. John Sullivan was a chief talent officer he banned cost-of-hire calculations because they have a “negative effect of causing our recruiters to shift their focus toward cost reduction and away from our real job, which was to produce high-performing hires.”
- Recruiters should actively source talent again.
Posting job ads, sifting through resumes and LinkedIn profiles, promoting jobs on social media are all part of the work of recruiters. These are administrative tasks. Whereas sales is all about hunting for new client prospects.
Recruiters need to be more like sales teams. Take a proactive approach, finding the passively active job seekers online, rather than waiting for them to come to you gives you a much better chance of finding the right talent for your company.
- Set realistic recruitment needs.
Aiming for Purple Squirrels, Unicorns or A-players is a better than ideal outcome. It’s shooting for the moon, knocking one out the park. But it also could be a costly mistake if it takes six months to fill a role which should have taken three. With the time it takes to on-board a new member of staff that’s almost three quarters of lost productivity in a key area.
Plus the cost of recruiting and training them. Once they’re up to speed there’s no guarantee they be right for your culture or perform as well as they did in previous roles. The downside risk is simply too great.
Instead, set realistic goals based on the quality of candidate the organisation actually needs. Redefine perfect, then go out and find that candidate, rather than waiting for them to find your job ads. Finding the “perfect” candidate for a role isn’t easy, but recruiters make it more challenging with vague definitions of unrealistic perfection.
Social Paul
A recruiter who knows how to convert talent by using various tactics on Social Media. Follow Paul here! If you are interested to learn more about Candarine contact us today!
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