It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has been part of a recruitment drive or hiring process — you hype yourself up imagining an impeccable resume will appear in your inbox, followed by a personable, engaging interview, and undeniable enthusiasm for your organization. This imagined candidate checks every box and then some, making the often-difficult process of recruitment seem straightforward or even easy. However, just as familiar is the feeling of disappointment when you realize that this perfect candidate isn’t coming along and that you’ve set your expectations too high in order to prepare yourself for a long process of vetting and interviews.
This kind of thinking is understandable, as it allows you to extend your enthusiasm for your nonprofit’s mission into the process of recruitment. However, it can hide many pitfalls and issues and set you up to miss out on hiring talented, driven new team members. This thinking can also hide implicit biases, leading you to create a team and organization that lacks a diverse set of experiences and opinions. Finally, it ignores the potential for team members to grow, change, and improve their skills on the job. Here’s how chasing an imagined perfect candidate can lead to some significantly less than perfect hiring outcomes:
Unconscious bias
The last decade has seen some major shifts in the way leaders engage in recruitment and hiring, thanks to a broader awareness of unacknowledged biases in the recruitment process. An overreliance on networking, credentialism, and other commonly utilized hiring practices often led to marginalized employees being overlooked or outright ignored by hiring managers. Awareness of these issues led to greater scholarship and understanding of the subject, and brought to light not just questions around equity but also illustrated the significant organizational benefits of hiring from a diverse pool of candidates.
This is a key issue to keep in mind when you are engaged in the hiring process. Try and develop an understanding of exactly what a “perfect candidate” means to you. Also, check among other team members as they engage in interviewing candidates and recruiting. As a team, discuss potential unconscious bias, and what you can do to eliminate that as you proceed.
Perfect candidates or perfect employees
Another issue with fixating on an imagined perfect candidate is that you can miss out on the long and more involved process through which all team members improve and evolve toward “ideal employees”. Although recruiters and platforms like LinkedIn may promise otherwise, there simply isn’t a way to assess exactly how good a given candidate can be through resumes, interviews, or skill assessments. Organizational culture fit, adaptability, and the ability to collaborate well are things that are learned over time and develop as an employee fulfills and expands on their contributions to the organization.
Another thing to consider is the way that modern recruitment and job application processes have created incentives and skills that allow candidates to appear ‘perfect’ without necessarily being ideal for your organization. AI-generated resumes and cover letters, embellished details, and other application strategies speak to the pressures that many job seekers are under to stand out. Additionally, the sheer volume of applications and interviews can lead some job seekers to develop interviewing skills and strategies that get them noticed but don’t necessarily reflect their actual capabilities or enthusiasm. Alternatively, a candidate who “interviews well” isn’t automatically a bad potential employee, but this factor should make you consider what an idealized candidate really looks like, and if they need to come in appearing to be a success on day one. The best option could end up being someone who is willing to learn and invest in your mission, rather than someone with all the requisite skills who will move on to another opportunity as soon as it makes sense for them.
Missing out on soft skills
Quite often, a relentless pursuit of the perfect candidate ends up missing out on many of the crucial traits that make a great team member and long-term contributor. As stated above, there are some major limitations when it comes to assessing job candidates based on a job board profile, resume, or interviews. If you take a cursory glance at your team, more than likely, a couple of valued team members started out as less experienced and credentialed job candidates. They became indispensable team members because of their interpersonal skills, willingness to learn, and dedication to your organization’s mission, things that could not be easily summarized or expressed as line items on a resume.
Passing over candidates who don’t have an idealized skillset or bring a “complete package” to the role can actually be counterproductive and limit your options. Soft skills, like collaboration, creativity, empathy, and an ability to compromise are hard to measure, and probably aren’t going to become evident until late in a job search when you are speaking with a candidate’s references and former supervisors. Before you begin your job search process, you should do an internal assessment of the characteristics that seem to work best on your team and in your organization. If your team does a lot of collaborative work, this should be a point of emphasis when speaking with job seekers, rather than hard skills. After all, a perfect candidate in your mind might meet a certain set of criteria, but you aren’t going to be the only person working with them. Viewing the hiring process holistically and taking culture fit into account is important to ensure that whoever you hire is not just productive but becomes a lasting contributor.
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The information contained in this article is not a substitute for legal advice or counsel and has been pulled from multiple sources.
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