Hard yards
No problem, pt 4
As I was sipping my coffee this morning, I was in two minds.
Should I get out for a run? Can I even be bothered to, having ran 14 hours earlier?
On its own a straightforward decision, but complicated by my self-inflicted target of 2,000 miles for the year.
If I don’t go for a run, I won’t be 7 miles closer to that target.
No big deal in its own right, but those miles add up quickly, and at some point my overall goal becomes unachievable, especially as my current average daily mileage is slightly behind the required rate.
But 2,000 miles was actually my stretch target for the year, back in March, and became achievable because I kept slogging away.
I’m actually ahead of where I’d need to be if I just chilled out, so maybe a rest day is a good idea.
I mean a worst-case scenario with overtraining is a significant injury, which at 45 will only take longer and longer to recover from, making that target impossible and with worse consequences too.
Anyway, visualising all these scenarios, including realistic worst-case ones, enabled me to skip lightly out of the front door.
I wasn’t sufficiently comfortable with the decision not to run, for that to be my decision.
No reason to dwell on a potential injury either, in case it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
As I trudged heavily up the final mile of my route, I realised I’d forgotten one other worst-case scenario - heat stroke.
Perhaps I’ll read this back tomorrow, wondering at the sense of writing through delirium.
Anyway, I’ve recently come to see this thought process is how I generally set plans.
I look at worst-case scenarios, realistic outcomes, and the things I hope for, then make an actionable plan that either prevents problems from arising or mitigates them in advance. As well as one that has the best odds of reaching the outcome I most want.
As Simon rightly pointed out, this is negative visualisation, part of Stoicism, where you conduct a pre-mortem before you set out on a project.
It’s also similar in principle to reducing technical debt, understanding opportunity cost, and the Cost of Inaction.
And so we come to recruitment.
How can we negatively visualise outcomes so that we don’t have to solve problems?
One way is the benefit of hindsight, and reading about bad situations on social media:
a bad hire that leaves a path of chaos on their way out
a good hire that boomerangs back to their previous employers
a hoped hire who doesn’t start
one who accepts a counteroffer
one who doesn’t accept your offer
a vacancy that isn’t filled
adverts that receive many applicants and no candidates
ghosting
The benefit of having solved or mitigated these problems at some point is that you can learn from your own mistakes, and improve next time.
Do it enough times and you can devise a framework that reduces the odds of them occurring in future.
And in the same way that list above is reverse chronological, so too is the opportunity for problem prevention.
Get it right from the top of the procress, and it's easier to get back on course if issues do come up.
If you’ve experienced these problems, what might you have done differently?
Do that next time and you reduce the odds that problem occurring again.
Yes, we can’t control the behaviour of others, but we can influence them through our own actions, behaviours and messaging.
Indeed, many of these newsletters are as much about problem prevention as they are about better recruitment.
Whether it’s appropriate multichannel, showing context, showing ikigai, critical path recruitment process, messaging, 5 Why, value propositions, advertising, conversion rate optimisation, or simply reflecting on your candidates’ experiences.
Get your recruitment right and you'll reduce the odds of bad outcomes.
Have you ever been punting on the Cam?
I strongly recommend it.
When you first do it, you’ll loop from side to side, sometimes you’ll even face the wrong direction.
Or get stuck in a tree.
But as you become better, you’ll see that a straight path and the best speed are achieved through holding and pushing the punt pole in the right way, with only minor adjustments needed as it tails behind.
You won’t even need that oar you’d been relying on the first time.
Anyhoo back to recruitment, which is exactly the same.
Get recruitment right from first principles, with a strategy that prevents and reduces problems, and the vacancies that might have been problematic may well be straightforward.
Of course, there are vacancies that suffer from skills shortages. But if you aren’t accountable for your part in the process - there’s very little reason to complain.
And if you ‘recruit right’ you have the best chance of beating competing employers.
How much effort you put in depends on what you see as the realistic worst-case scenarios in your recruitment, and how comfortable you are with them happening.
An open vacancy may be a mild administrative discomfort, in which case whacking another ad up and seeing what happens may be a reasonable course of action.
Maybe someone ‘good enough’ is all you need, so your recruitment can just be good enough too. A marginal gain may not be worth the cost.
Ironically, although many of my first roles with employers are problem vacancies and key hires, often it leads to simpler recruitment too, because the benefits of my process are clear.
I do actually like easy vacancies, btw, so feel free to send them my way.
Next time you have a vacancy, visualise the realistic worst-case scenarios.
How comfortable are you with those outcomes?
That should inform the work you need to do to get that vacancy right.
Thanks for reading.
Greg
p.s. if you’d like me to solve your recruitment problem, or just recruit straightforwardly, maybe we can talk.