Unrealistic Expectations in Hiring

I have hired hundreds and prepared thousands of candidates throughout my three decades in Executive Search. Whether I was on the third-party side or the Executive Recruiting Team internally, gaining a hiring consensus around candidate traits, experience, expertise, knowledge, and skills before any search commences is imperative. 

Unrealistic hiring expectations cripple a search, leading to time and money lost.  

As a Hiring Manager or Hiring Cohort, you must predetermine acceptable trade offs prior to any search commencing. Unrealistic expectations cause a painful candidate experience, unnecessary delays in attracting top talent, distention from the Hiring Cohort, frustration for the Hiring Manager, and delays in the hiring process wastes both time and money, while allowing top talent to slip from your grasp. Knowing this, it's time to stop waiting for the 'perfect' candidate to magically appear and start proactively pipelining strong candidates while building your internal succession planning model. 

The Perfect Candidate Syndrome 

The perfect candidate does not exist, mostly because the definition of perfection varies person to person, however, also because the Hiring Manager or Hiring Cohort can be unrealistic or unreasonable. I have experienced many Hiring Managers wanting unrealistic expectations during my career. This creates a huge gap between reality and expectations. For example, hiring new graduates or younger people means you must level the expectations and build from their coach-ability, cultural fit, and motivational fit to your organization. When you give someone a task with a deadline, and provide the necessary resources, you may be surprised at what they can accomplish. Communication is the key to success in recruiting top talent. Communication with the candidates and the internal stakeholders.

Three criteria that work best in filling any role:

🟠 75% skills match

🟠 90% cultural and motivational fit

🟠 100% coachable with a continual learning mindset while being vocally self-critical

The Perfect Candidate does not exist. The sooner you realize this, the more effective you will become around hiring top talent. Stop chasing imaginary candidates.

Agreed upon Must-Haves

The shorter the list of 'must-haves', the better, in order to close the time-to-hire gap and realistically recruit top talent that is available now. The longer a search continues, the more negative force that is exerted on the organization. Someone has to cover the work that the new hire will eventually perform, adding stress, longer hours, and more effort required for that internal resource. This tends to lead to burnout for the impacted internal resource and increases unexpected attrition. 

Create the three to five 'must-haves' that all agree to before the start of any recruitment activity. The more 'must-haves' that exist, the smaller the pool of potential qualified candidates, and the longer the search will take to conclude. Add the 'nice-to-haves' as well so the recruiting team has that awareness to identify the best fit candidates available in the market.  

Gaps vs. Reasons 

There is a stigma around gaps in employment and tenure at a company that need to be reevaluated. The average tenure in the United States has fallen from 4.1 years in 2015, to 3.9 years in 2024, according the the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the lowest since the pandemic in 2022 at 3.8 years. However, the BLS reports workers ages 25 to 34 dip to an alarming 2.7 years of tenure in 2024. This data does not include mandatory layoffs or reduction in force mandates, experienced recently from big tech firms and others during and after the global pandemic. 

This downward tenure trend is primarily attributed to poor leadership, over hiring during a global pandemic, toxic work environments, a negative or inconsistent culture, and fickle internal organizational policies. For example, setting a policy to hire remotely during the pandemic with the promise that you can work from anywhere, only to use the 'bait and switch' tactic of turning 180 degrees to mandatory return to office policies following the global pandemic, leaving thousands of highly qualified and top producers to find their next role. This shows poor decision making skills from leadership and breeds a toxic work culture. More often than not, it was an organizational misstep that should have no bearing on the candidate's career path. Treating workers as disposable numbers versus value-creating performers shows the true colors of an organization. One that a perceived 'job hopper' can easily dispute.

That said, have an open discussion around career moves and the reasoning behind each career move before bias comes into play.  

The Solution

Employ the Performance Mindset Associates APEX-factor Hiring Model to ensure an excellent candidate experience  and a consistent approach to take to attraction to your organization. 

This proven hiring approach brings consistently to your talent attraction and talent acquisition processes, along with building a positive reputation around your candidate experience. Incorporate a balance of behavioral-based Interviewing, culture and motivational fit questions, and a deeper dive into how each candidate performs at work in their recent roles. 

Setting clear expectations prior to the start of any search, empowering your recruiting team with accurate and agree upon parameters for each search, getting alignment from all hiring parties, and providing timely feedback and communication throughout the hiring process will create a great candidate experience, and allow you to attract top talent faster.

Mark Krajnik, LSSGB, CPC, (The Culture Coach) is the CEO at Performance Mindset Associates (PMA). Mark is a tenured Talent Strategist, Executive Coach, and experienced people leader, and offers fractional chief people officer services. He is an Executive Talent Leader in recruitment operations, executive search, talent acquisition, L&D, culture coaching, human capital consulting, change management, and talent management. He is very passionate about people, building high-performance teams, creating retention-focused cultures, and career development. He brings a focus on performance, execution, creative problem solving, and goal achievement. Please go to performancemindset.co for more information or send an email to info@performancemindset.co.