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This is a guest blog via my friend Dietmar Tietz who also posted this on The Recruiter Network LinkedIn group.
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Right now, hiring is a pure elimination process: Whoever cannot be screened out gets an interview. Employers complain that there are no exciting applicants in the final selection.
Here is an example to illustrate the results of an elimination process: Imagine you go to a Chinese restaurant and cannot eat anything that contains gluten. After eliminating all items with gluten from the menu, you are basically stuck with white rice. What a disappointment! Why is only rice left? Because all other items contain soy sauce, which contains gluten. Here is a way to a much more exciting outcome: You can ask the waiter to not have a sauce with gluten. What a surprise! All of a sudden you can choose from almost every item on the menu, only with a different kind of sauce that is also tasteful.
How does this approach translate to hiring? You don’t start with screening out, instead you look for people with great talent and potential. It doesn’t matter if they have all the skills because employers can send them to training. And someone with great talent will be a quick learner.
Headhunter Jeff Altman mentioned in one of his recent YouTube videos that employers pay him a fortune to chase down a purple squirrel, a candidate with a combination of skills that virtually does not exist. His presentation concludes: Can’t employers just send a candidate to training? It will cost them 1/10 of what I charge them for weeks and weeks of retained search. Instead, they keep rejecting candidates that are so close to what they are looking for, but still not close enough.
To bring it back to the original posting: Why are only those candidates acceptable who have a perfect resume? Are they hiring resume writers?