When you are trying to hire someone, what are you trying to do? Assuming you’re doing the sensible ‘hire once you can afford it'[1], parts of your organization are probably bursting at the seams, or people are probably feeling a bit (or a lot) overworked. Maybe a key person just left. Either way….

…you probably want to get someone in quickly, to fill the gap that you see in your organization, to take the load off yourself or the people around you.

At the same time, you want to get the right person in, someone who will add to your organization, someone who, over the time they’re with the organization, will be a net benefit.

So, ideally, you want the ‘right’ person, or the ‘best’ person quickly. But the world is not ideal, so you’ll probably have to compromise on ‘best’ slowly, or ‘good enough’ ‘as quick as you can'[5].

The issue here is that different people have different opinions of ‘good enough’, and ‘fast enough’. Sometimes, that is fine:

There’s probably a less stringent application process for washing dishes at a fast food restaurant[6], than for writing the code involved in launching nuclear weapons[7]. If you’re down one poll clerk with 30 minutes to go before the election starts, you probably need to act more quickly than if you’re a 20,000 person organization with 200 current job openings.

Next time, we’ll talk about different opinions of ‘good enough’ and ‘fast enough’ for hiring, and some things you can do about it. In the meantime:

Why are *you* hiring? What are your time horizons? Your short- and long-term goals?

[1]Aside from the nods I’ll get from most of the audience, this makes sense from a competitive perspective. In a perfect/ideal/rollingsphere[2] market situation, where different market participants have no edge beyond how hard they work, those who work harder (however that is defined). This means that whoever is working hardest is potentially (not necessarily) the most profitable and most able to hire new people, to start the cycle all over again.

[2]”Picture the market as a perfect rolling sphere.”[3]

[3]The punchline for many jokes about physicists begins with the physicist making an assumption that some object or process acts as ‘a perfect rolling sphere’. This object or process is typically nothing like a sphere, such as a horse or a bank. However, this can be a powerful tool to get started on a solution, and who knows? Maybe parts of the ‘perfect rolling sphere’ solution may be pretty close to correct![4]

[4]’Spherical chickens’ is not too far off from correct for a number of applications.

[5]If you’re Valve, or Google, this may not apply as strongly. Valve insists on ‘best’, regardless of speed, but they probably get a number and quality of applicants that would stagger any recruiter. Google probably doesn’t have to wait so much, but has a different problem of sorting through so many applications, with some interesting solutions [Wired paywall]

[6]I mention this because I once helped a nice young man with his application, so it springs to mind.

[7]I mention this because the very concept terrifies me, and I hope someone very very careful is the one doing this.