Recruiters have a term for what you are probably looking for in a candidate. You’re looking for someone who is young (around 25 yrs old) with a college degree (preferably a masters), who has 5-10 years experience in the field, is an expert at Excel and SAP (or Oracle), works well in groups or alone, has had experience from at least 5 different companies but is a stable worker, speaks at least 1 other language – all for a $10 hr receptionist/admin position at a local 5-person sales firm. This candidate is referred to as a Pink Squirrel – they don’t exist in nature.
The question for you is, do you really need everything that is on your “required” list? The current national economic crisis means that there is an excessive number of exceptionally qualified job candidates out there that will work for relatively low pay (compared to what their experience required two or three years ago) and it is tempting to try and get the most experienced bang for your buck. But is hiring that out-of-work IT Manager for a $13-hr telephone tech support position the right thing for your company in the long run?
· Education – Does the job require advanced education and how much. Few things make less sense to me than “4-year college degree required – ANY degree”. Is this a job for an engineer or a truck driver? A CPA might need an accounting degree, but what about a payroll entry clerk? My experience shows that this requirement is often an attempt to recruit more “well rounded” candidates without actually talking to the potential employees. Although it might save you some time looking through resumes, that philosophy might be excluding knowledgeable candidates who already have real-world experience with the skills you are looking for. I would put less emphasis on a college degree and more on recent exposure to industry best-practices and continuing education.
· Skills – How often do you see someone requiring candidates have expert level skills in Excel and then using those skills to build address lists? The skill set that you ask for should be relevant to the actual job requirements and not something that you expect someone to know 5 years from now. Unless you need a specific level of competence for the job – like an accountant using a Excel or a database engineer using SQL, you might find that many of your “basic” knowledge people actually know more than what they think and can pick up the rest pretty quick.
· Experience – It used to be that you judged a person’s worth by how long they stayed at a company, with people getting their “50 year pins” at retirement. Now, if you stay at a company for too long – like more than 2 years, you aren’t seen as a “go getter”. What works best for your organization? Don’t fall into the hype of “I have to change out my personnel every year or two or they become stagnant” – and don’t automatically assume that someone you want to hire must be a job-hopping-ladder-chaser to be a valued (but temporary) member of your team.
This list goes on and on, but you get the picture. The most important thing to take away from this is that you must have a true understanding of what would make a prospective employee successful in their new position and not what you have been told that you want. Let the actual department manager or the person who will supervise the new employee be involved early on in the process, rather than simply submitting a personnel request to HR and allowing them to run with the printed job requirements. (Not knocking HR, but every line on a job requirement list should be audited for why it is a requirement). Someone who embodies the company culture and has a true passion for your industry could be weeded out by a recruiter, your own staff, or even by themselves when there are unnecessary requirements placed on a position.
One last morsel of food for thought. If you do actually find that pink squirrel, will they will always be looking over their shoulder for the next best thing, leaving you on the hunt again?
