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The Perfect Candidate Is a Myth

You can’t always get what you want

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.” Or, if you don’t like birds, “beggars can’t be choosers.” We have many idioms about managing expectations – probably because it’s just so hard to do. But when you have a problem to solve and the clock is ticking, you can’t wait for everything to be just right. Perfectionism can come later, right now you have to get stuff done.

As recruiters we see this issue from both employers and job seekers. This month we’re talking to employers, so listen up: There is no such thing as the perfect candidate. If you won’t hire anyone but the perfect match, you won’t hire at all.

Luckily, you can find very good candidates, excellent ones, even! But with every hire, you have to take the good with the not-so-good.

Say you need an experienced field service technician with very specific certs. Over a few weeks you find several technicians with different certifications and less experience than you’d like. You could reject them and keep looking, leaving that chair empty and your team overworked to make up for it. Or you could hire one or two of the technicians who showed good aptitude for learning and get them certified.

We suggest the latter. Yes, it will take time, yes, it is an investment. But the former option is to wait passively for luck, and the latter is an active decision to forge ahead. Is it good financial advice to bet on the lottery rather than to work and save your earnings? Sure, you could get lucky and have huge rewards. But will you? When? And what will you do in the meantime?

This will only get harder

As more and more Baby Boomers retire, our national workforce will continue to shrink. Not only will we be losing their leadership, experience and institutional knowledge, we simply do not have the bodies to fill their empty seats.

Industry employers are competing against each other and other industries for candidates. Companies that can’t attract the top employees need to develop strategies to train up the future best employees, instead.

The best time to start this process was 10 years ago, the second-best time is today.