In the wake of the Great Recession and subsequent recovery period, there has been a significant philosophical shift in what hiring managers need to look for when bringing in new candidates. Ultimately, this means hiring managers have to revise their standards. Instead of settling for nothing less than the perfect candidate, it's best to find someone with adequate skills who can fit a specific need at an organization. Those who haven't adopted this idea may find that the hiring process challenging because they are searching for an extremely rare breed of candidate and passing on those who might end up being a better long-term fit.
But why do hiring managers at tech companies hold onto this perfection-or-bust mindset? An article in Information Week examined three possible explanations. If these apply to your own hiring experience, you may be doing your organization a disservice.
You made some hiring mistakes in the past and are afraid of repeating those blunders. It's human nature to want to rectify our mistakes the best we can, which sometimes causes us to overcompensate. It's important to alleviate the risk of brining on a problematic employee again, but that doesn't mean you have to narrow your vision when evaluating potential hires.
You don't have an accurate view of the market. The aforementioned recession and recovery may have skewed some hiring managers' view of the job market. In some industries, there are hoards of highly qualified individuals anxiously waiting a job opportunity, but in tech that number is much lower. In fact, according to the news source, the unemployment rate in the tech industry is below 4 percent.
You believe you don't have the bandwidth to train new people. You may hold out on filling a position because you don't believe you can afford to train the new hire, but in many cases, it might be more expensive to leave a position empty. As with everything in business, you must consider the ROI of bringing on a new employee or leaving a position unfilled.
While businesses should always try to find the best possible people, having an open mind can help with hiring initiatives. VAR Staffing can identify and recruit the best people to fill open positions at VARs and MSPs.
