If you’re not conducting interviews every week, you need to prepare as much as the candidate. That means not only following best practices, but making sure you are in the right mindset to make a great decision.
It’s easy to write out a laundry list of expectations for your perfect candidate and be disappointed again and again as real applicants don’t measure up. You want someone with five years of sales experience, a master’s degree, in-depth industry knowledge, and familiarity with your software. Not to mention they need to be motivated, charismatic, reliable, and any number of abstract traits we try to gleam from the interview process.
When we set our expectations at super-human levels, or even try to clone a current top-performer, we are setting ourselves up to fail. What you should decide is what expectations are most important to you. Maybe you don’t have the training resources to teach a new employee how to sell, so that sales experience is non-negotiable. But as long as they have proven experience, their level of education might not matter as much. Or it could be just the opposite for you.
Instead of looking for where candidates fall short, look at where they excel and how they might benefit your business. If their failings outweigh their potential, then you should move on. But without that calculation, you could be missing out on some great hires.
How do you avoid waiting on Superman and hiring great, real people?
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