Are you looking for candidates or employees?
Good candidates don’t always make the best employees…
A “good” candidate will always be a good candidate unless they take a slight detour on their career path. That also means that they will remain a good candidate for other recruiters when they are working for you… Developing loyalty thus becomes a more arduous job.
By always wanting to seek out the best candidates, we will always end up going after the same individuals…those who have all the following qualities:
- Good-looking (or a pleasant appearance to be “politically correct”)
- Intelligent
- Good education
- Good work experience
- A current job
- In a good age-group
- Have a career plan
- Full of enthusiasm
- of maturity
- of energy
- of get-up-and-go
- Makes eye contact
- Shakes your hand with the exact right amount of firmness you expect
- Etc…
- Etc…
- Etc…
These candidates don’t come cheap…indeed even more expensive when you have to consign the task to an external recruiter to hunt down and win over the ‘rare bird’!
There are two types of candidate; good ones and ordinary ones. Let us say that “bad candidates” are not actually in the running in view of the job profile.
There are two types of employees; good ones and ordinary ones. The “bad employees” never last very long…
It may seem like nothing, but the transition from candidate to employee status can sometimes lead to surprises, which I’m sure you are already aware of…
It is much easier to appear as a good candidate for the duration of the recruitment process than to be a good employee over several years.
It’s not natural for everyone to “do well” in an interview. However, it is a quality which is too often required regardless of the job to fill. The requirement of this quality in a candidate when it is of no use for the job is a case of unnecessarily limiting your pool of potential candidates and artificially increasing your recruitment costs.
The “ordinary” candidates who turn out to be good employees only rarely apply elsewhere and by definition are difficult to pinpoint and sniff out. Ask yourself if sometimes they don’t compensate for the fact of being “ordinary” candidates by being better employees than the others…
Good candidates are more costly not because they are better employees but simply because they are good candidates. At the hiring stage you always negotiate salary with a candidate, not with an employee. It’s clear that a good candidate will better negotiate their salary, as it is part of what we expect from a good candidate.
Finally, just like at the market, it is about finding under-valued candidates with good potential for progress. It seems that it’s these types who “bring” the most.