What good looks like

The importance of realistically defining ‘good’ in a candidate for easier recruitment.

A little while back I was referred to a service business that was productising into SaaS and needed someone to take the lead in bringing their solution to market.

Getting the right person on board was critical, in delivering to their needs, and in complementing the skills base of their exec team.

It was a brand new role, and they wanted to choose between me and one other agency to find them this CTO.

The first agency said they could find someone and promised “5 CVs by Friday” if given the go-ahead.

When I consulted with the CEO, my first question was – what do you mean by a CTO?

They had sketched out their needs, then looked at job boards for vacancies that seemed a close fit, using content from CTO job descriptions to fill out their own.

But a CTO was not what they needed, given this was a commercial product leadership role.

By asking the right questions, and in partnership with them, I rebuilt their vacancy into a Chief Product Officer role that would also serve as the CEO’s technical right-hand.

Their new CPO started five weeks later and one year on has made significant strides in bringing their product to market.

It proved a simple, if intensive, piece of recruitment that started from the first principles of establishing ‘good’ in the right candidate.

Had they recruited a CTO, they might have stumbled along with the product, while finding other benefits of optimising their technology portfolio. However, they would have missed out on the specific skills base their product lead brought to the table.

If you don’t define good, you risk looking for a non-existent Unicorn, stretching out your process unnecessarily while hoping ‘perfect’ appears, or hiring not just the wrong person, but someone that might set your business back.

It’s a simple enough concept – understand the attitudes and behaviours, together with the hard minimum skills, qualifications and industry tools & processes required to fulfil a role and build it from there.

Of course, that requires fully understanding what your role entails, how it fits in with the business, what the context is, where the gaps are, culture fit or better yet culture add.

The more straightforward a role, the easier this is to establish. The worse your understanding of your own role and situation, the harder it is to establish what good actually is.

A good starting point is to build a minimum viable vacancy – what your vacancy needs to achieve – then map out the types of skills that can achieve this.

From there flesh out the vacancy with the duties and responsibilities that support its goal, and use this additional information to build a candidate profile.

A weak understanding of your requirement and “good” is one reason you defer to “wrong industry experience”, “wrong culture fit”, “overqualified” or the other generic reasons that qualify candidates out because you think they are too risky.

Once you drill down into the specific detail of what good actually is, these excuses become irrelevant, because you can say exactly what should qualify in or out a candidate from assessing them truly and fairly.

Ask Why? and So What? of your assumptions until you get to the root cause, which will allow you to define good. There’s a reason why 5Y is an effective problem-solving tool, and it can be applied in recruitment.

Establishing the right “good” is a foundation for an effective and fair recruitment process that gives you access to more, better qualified candidates – an ideal way to improve your odds of filling a vacancy that also serves to improve your retention.

And something, in my experience, not enough employers do.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Greg

p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services:

- recruitment of commercial, operational and technical leadership vacancies

- manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis (Cognate)

- recruitment coaching and mentoring

- recruitment strategy setting

- outplacement support

Just hit reply to check if my approach is right for you.