When you buy fruit from the grocery or local market, chances are you take a close look at each piece before placing it in your cart.
Not because you are super picky, necessarily, but because you want to avoid wasting money on below average food.
Choosing the best talent is not that different.
Let me explain.
As we learned definitively in 2015, the ability to deliver quality hires consistently is the top talent acquisition priority for business stakeholders all over the world. Unfortunately, it is also an area where many recruitment teams are falling way short.
The rush to put “rears in seats” can feel unavoidable for many working within internal talent acquisition teams. You are being pulled in a dozen different directions by internal clients with a dozen different priorities.
Taking the time to ensure your talent pools and individual candidates are cream of the crop may seem like a luxury you will never be afforded.
The (Out of Stock) Market
This sticky situation is not unique to recruiters:
Imagine that your job was to deliver fresh fruit and vegetables to a local chef every day.
The chef trusts your judgment and relies on you to find items of the highest quality. But he also needs you to work quickly. Grocery grabbers from competing restaurants are scoping the same market stalls – so you have to snag the best ingredients before they do. There is a limited supply. And good luck explaining that you were haggling for a better deal when your competition walked off with the goods.
Bringing back below average or even just “fine” items would be bad for you, the chef and the business. You do not become top chef by cooking with low quality ingredients.
Why Being Purposefully Picky Pays Off
So we should avoid grabbing whatever we can get – for obvious reasons. That is why it is so important to be purposeful in our candidate selection process. There are a million ways we can forget to do this, whether it is by skipping careful scrutiny of candidates because someone is on our backs about our time-to-fill, or settling for whoever bites first.
But here is the thing.
Being purposefully picky is the only way your organization will get ahead.
Hiring managers make the ultimate decision on who joins the company. But just like the chef, they depend on you to bring them what they are looking for.
This is why Cielo believes in the power of Recruitment Process Outsourcing. Our partners get teams of recruitment professionals who are focused solely on finding the best talent for their organization. It is like having a pro buyer at each stand in the market at all times. And that is just one piece of the full RPO pie.
But after all this talk about delicious food … maybe we should take a break from brain activity and put our taste buds to work instead.