Recruiting and change

I’ve been involved in recruiting companies for longer than I care to mention. Actually, I will mention it, I believe it’s over fifteen years now.

There aren’t many universal truths about recruiting and hiring. Some employers find success hiring only virtual people. Some, only in-house. Some companies have great success paying for top, senior-level talent. Some do well by hiring only people with no experience at all.

Buddha said that everything is in a constant state of change. This, I would say, is just about the only universal truth about recruiting. One day, a company is hiring 10,000 workers across the board; the next, they are laying people off. One day, they are sending everyone home to work remotely; the next, they are mandating long hours at one central location.

Hiring managers want to hire a software engineer with purely technical skills. The next hour, they realize that they really need someone who can translate technical requirements into business-speak.

Recruiting requires putting up with this constant change and there is no handbook for what definitely makes for a good hiring strategy, although many books have been written on the subject.

I’ll bet that it’s one of the hallmarks of being in a particular business for a long time – when you know that there are no easy answers. That everything changes. When you learn to spot a fixed idea as a weakness, and when you design your products around adaption.