The title of this post comes from the book Essentialism from Greg McKeown. I have never found a better way to express how important, how critical it is to only hire great candidates.
The biggest mistake is to hire a second choice candidate, someone we have doubts on, someone we know is not going to be a great hire with the usual excuse that we are in a rush, that we need someone to take this role, that we need someone very quickly to do the job…. what a costly mistake!
We should NEVER hire an acceptable candidate instead of being patient and working harder until we find a great candidate.
Once you hire the right person your life can really change, you can move forward, you can grow, work on more interesting projects, a new world opens to you…. when you hire someone who is not going to perform well, you will go through months of challenges, frustrations, time wasting…. and still at the end of this long and painful journey you will need to restart the recruitment process again, and pretty often have a big mess to clean up.
Yes recruitment is extremely difficult… we lack CVs, it takes too long to screen and interview candidates, we get rejected, while our days are so busy and there is so much pressure to hire… so we sometimes get weak and take shortcuts… we go for the easy way, we hire someone who might be ok but who is not a great hire… STOP… this is going to take you nowhere…. this is a HUGE mistake.
Hiring the right candidate is life changer, an amazing accelerator, with the right person in your team the sky is the limit… with the wrong candidate… good luck to achieve anything… you will go nowhere.
Be ridiculously selective in hiring people.
And yes, I know it is super difficult, super frustrating, but it is life changing… this is the best and only way to keep growing as a manager. The leverage is so big that I believe it is worth the pain. Don’t give up, stay focused on finding great hires only.
Ferrandou 