When A Hiring Requirement Starts Working Against You.
Every recruitment brief needs requirements.
Qualifications, experience, industry knowledge, technical skills – some will be genuinely essential.
But sometimes a perfectly reasonable hiring requirement can start limiting the very candidate search it’s meant to guide.
We were reminded of this recently.
We were recruiting for a role where previous industry experience was considered important.
So we searched the industry. We mapped the talent pool, approached relevant candidates and advertised the opportunity.
But we also looked beyond it.
Why?
Because there’s an important question worth asking in any recruitment process:
What does this person genuinely need to already have – and what could the right person learn?
One candidate made that question particularly relevant.
She came from outside the industry and was looking for a completely new direction.
On paper, she wasn’t the obvious match.
In person, it was a very different story.
She had the drive, resilience, curiosity, energy and genuine sales “hunter” mentality the role needed.
The industry knowledge wasn’t there – but that could be learned!
So, the more important question was – what is genuinely non-negotiable?
This is where a recruitment brief can either help a candidate search – or unnecessarily restrict it.
We find it useful to separate hiring requirements into three areas:
What must they already have?
Some qualifications, technical capabilities or experience really are essential.
What could the right person learn?
Industry knowledge, products, systems and processes can often be taught.
What is much harder to teach?
Attitude, drive, resilience, curiosity and commercial instinct – and considerably harder to develop.
The answer will be different for every role.
Industry experience may be critical in one position and simply preferable in another.
The important part is understanding why it’s on the brief.
Are you hiring for the brief – or the role?
A good recruitment brief should give a search direction without becoming a set of blinkers.
That doesn’t mean compromising on what you need.
Sometimes it means getting more specific about what you really need.
In our recent search, looking beyond one original requirement allowed us to introduce someone the employer may otherwise never have considered.
And that’s the bigger recruitment lesson.
The strongest candidate isn’t always the person who looks most like the original brief. Sometimes it’s the person who makes you look at the brief differently.
If you’re recruiting and finding that the right people aren’t appearing, it may be worth looking at the brief before simply running the same search again.
Talk to The Recruitment People about your next hire →
This article featured in our September Recruitment Update.
Read the full September newsletter →