The last couple months, I have been thinking about a conversation years ago with a colleague who was hiring for a role and was trying to decide between two candidates: Candidate 1, who had basically done the job somewhere else, and Candidate 2, who was coming from a different field but had the requisite skills if not the domain-specific knowledge.
My colleague really wanted to hire the career-switcher, feeling like this person might bring a new perspective. On the other hand, the department (of four people) was getting ready for a key staff member to go on maternity leave and it was worthwhile to have someone who could hit the ground running and require less training. This is a valid consideration. My colleague also shared with me their fear that, since this role would be their first hire, they would be scrutinized and that it would be riskier to hire the candidate from a different field. So, my colleague hired the experienced candidate. (Which also meant the department remained…well, you could use the same general physical description for every single member of the team.)
The candidate who was hired left 18 months later for a more senior role at another organization. At the time, my colleague was still in the department – meaning there was no room for the experienced person to move up. And so, they had to hire all over again.
It’s an old and common story. It is far from the first time I’ve had a hiring manager share with me this same decision-making scenario.
Why do we keep doing this? I mean, I get why. And true, not everyone is looking to move up. But many people do want the ability to grow in some way—and to have that recognized. Hiring only someone who has done the job before is an extremely shortsighted view.
In this current Wild West of a job market, companies are offering signing bonuses for senior level positions that are typically not in fields where signing bonuses are the norm. I wonder if these same companies are willing to sponsor H1-B visas. (The cost of sponsoring an H1-B visa is considerably less than the last signing bonus that was mentioned to me.). I have asked one company (where a friend works) who has been in dire need of people, whether they’d be open to people who are less experienced—recent graduates or career switchers—given that they’ve been trying to fill some roles for nearly a year now. They were not.
Meanwhile, I know and have known a number of people who have been seeking and struggling to obtain full-time positions that they could certainly do well, even if their resume is a bit winding and storied and full of a wide breadth of experience rather than some sort of neatly packaged ascent of linearity. (I have been one of those people.) We’re talking about people who have been looking for full-time jobs for a year, two years.
How is it serving your organization to be running your people ragged and chasing after senior level people who—at some point—are going to run out if you never develop the pipeline? If you never take a chance on anyone? And if you only take chances on people whom you can see yourself in?
Not to mention the costs of attrition. Does it really save your organization that much to hire someone who can “hit the ground running” if you’re going to have to repeat the hiring process every 18-24 months?*
Forget about the costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. How disruptive is it to your teams every time someone leaves?
For the roles that are business critical, what does your pipeline look like? Who will you need in 5 years? And what are you doing in your current recruiting, hiring, professional development, and promotion practices to ensure you’ll be able to have the organizational capacity to take advantage of all the opportunities you’re working so hard to create?
*I did not look that up at all—just what it seems to be from my personal experiences watching and cleaning up after employee turnover.