Design for the best

There is a tension in recruiting that I often think about: posting a role online improves your talent reach but it can also compromise talent standards. Increasing volume while preserving quality feels like pulling in opposite directions.

I think every recruiter knows the following dynamic:

>>> You cast a wide net, you attract volume >>> Volume brings a large chunk of weak candidates, a lot of average candidates, and a couple of great ones, maybe 2 out of 100 >>> Because of the sheer weight of weak and average profiles, over time, you get subtly recalibrated on what "good" looks like.

The bar doesn't drop in a dramatic moment. It drifts slowly, unconsciously, with each CV reviewed. This ends in an unfortunate scenario where the quality benchmark shifts toward whoever is in front of you, not toward what the role actually demands.

This is why a solid, exhaustive definition of the role and what success looks like is essential to endure this tension. That means understanding what the person needs to accomplish, what problems they need to solve, and what great performance actually means in practice, before you look at a single candidate.

I am not criticizing open, volume-based processes. They serve a real purpose, especially when you have an urgent hiring need. If your employer brand is strong, you will find great candidates, roughly 1 to 2% of your applicant pool in my experience, or good candidates at around 5 to 7%. That's worth something.

Even if your employer brand is excellent, any great recruiter is still aware of an uncomfortable truth that makes their work especially valuable: the best candidate is probably not going to apply on your careers website. Sometimes they do, but not usually. That's why the best recruiters source proactively, invest in referrals, and build talent networks long before a role opens. This is the work that denotes true recruiting expertise, and it's backed by data.

The quality-of-hire hierarchy runs: Internal, Referrals, Sourced, Organic. Yet most companies invest in almost the exact reverse order.

The problem goes deeper than sourcing strategy, though. Even when top performers do enter your process, the process itself is often designed to filter them out. For decades, unconscious bias in hiring has favored candidates who are attractive, affable, articulate, and assertive, sometimes unfortunately over those who are simply the most capable.

In today's market, this bias has been supercharged. Looking good has never been easier! Candidates now have entire ecosystems dedicated to helping them look right: headshot coaches, AI resume tools, interview prep bots, and LinkedIn ghostwriters. The gap between looking good and being good has never been wider.

Meanwhile, the actual top performers, the ones heads-down delivering results at their current job, often have the weakest candidate presence. Their LinkedIn is outdated. They struggle to talk about themselves. They get nervous in interviews and give short answers. They haven't rehearsed the STAR method or value-fit questions. They don't perform well under the artificial conditions of a screening call, and so companies pass on them.

This is a generalization, of course. But tell me honestly:

Have you never felt yourself go lukewarm on a highly qualified candidate because of how they came across in a first call?

It's a quiet, pervasive failure and one of the hardest to root out if you genuinely aspire to hiring excellence. The good news is that none of this is inevitable.

What follows are seven things I think are worth repeating to oneself once in a while. I keep reminding myself of them throughout any search. They may seem obvious, but obvious things have a way of disappearing when you're deep in a recruiting process, reviewing your 78th resume of the day, while preparing five candidates for a hiring manager, while another hiring manager tells you they loved candidates A and B but would like to see more options, all at the same time.

1. Interview skills ≠ job performance. There is no strong correlation between interviewing skills, presentation skills, and on-the-job performance. Assessing candidates primarily on how well they interview is a terrible way to judge ability.
2. Top performers are selective. They do not use the same criteria or methods when looking for jobs. They look less frequently, and when they do, they are selective.
3. Career decision-making takes longer than your average time-to-hire. The best candidates use more decision variables when deciding whether to accept an offer. They take longer to respond to job ads, interview requests, or offers. They drop out early when something feels off: a slow process, an unresponsive recruiter, a vague job description, or a misaligned first call.
4. Strategic vs tactical. Job descriptions, job ads, sourcing tactics, and how you sell the job matter differently depending on the candidate. For an average candidate, a new job is often a tactical move based on short-term criteria. For the best, it is a strategic move.
5. Not a perfect fit but maybe better. The best candidates do not typically have the exact mix of skills, experience, and education described in the job description. They compensate with competencies and traits that are hard to filter or assess through a resume or LinkedIn profile: potential, self-motivation, leadership, drive, vision, learning agility, tenacity.
6. Keep-out! talent job descriptions. Boring job descriptions are a major obstacle to recruiting top talent. Unless you are an employer of choice, top people will not apply for plain, ordinary roles that look like everyone else’s. They want exclusivity, uniqueness, and a clear differentiator in terms of growth and career opportunity.
7. Nervousness ≠ incompetence. Many of the best professionals I know get nervous when being interviewed. That can mean looking at notes after a question, limited eye contact, short answers, a lack of polish or so-called executive presence. Having zero tolerance for that excludes strong candidates for superficial reasons.

These seven reminders reinforce a larger truth: most companies do not design their hiring systems around these subtle differences. As a result, they see fewer top people and, by default, hire the wrong type of candidate.

I like to think that the best candidates really are different from the rest, not only because they produce better performance on the job, but also because of how they search for opportunities and the criteria they use to choose one offer over another.

Taking these differences into account could be the difference between making hiring a competitive advantage or not.

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