Hiring the best candidate not the best resume: there are many qualified people seeking positions--from a credentials standpoint. The real challenge for successful talent acquisition and management is finding the candidate that "fits" in.

• Author: Odom, Curtis L.
• Position: Career

Recruiters are the ones out there on the frontlines of the workforce, trying to bring talent into organizations. And though there are a lot of qualified people--from a credential standpoint--the "fit" is where the true challenge lies. Will this person fit our organization? There are many meanings to that. For example: does the person look and feel to others like they belong in this organization?

The answers to those questions play a huge role in the talent acquisition success. Unfortunately, recruiting and staffing is often seen by the organization as an easy thing, as a lower-level skill. To the contrary, identifying the right match of talent to the organization and the hiring manager that needs that talent is probably one of the hardest things under the umbrella of talent management.

Organizations sometimes shy away from being very definitive about the type of person they want, commonly because they don't want to be viewed as being biased in some way. But this could be erring too far on the side of "political correctness." As a culture and a society, this concept has been carried way too far.

One of the biggest frustrations of hiring managers is that recruiters take too long to get the talent the company needs. In reality, the business doesn't understand what the recruiter is doing.

When the hiring manager says, "I need a business development manager. I want them to have 10-12 years worth of experience. I want them to have worked for a Fortune 100 company and have a book of existing clients. I want this person to be in the local area, because I'm not paying for relocation."

All of these unique factors not only shrink the candidate pool and restrict the options of what the recruiter has to work with, but also increases time to hire. And this is just one of the issues recruiters are faced with daily. Once the hiring manager says, "Do you have everything you need? You're going to get me this person? Great, thanks." Then the clock starts for the business leader right then and there.

The Recruiter's Role

In reality, the recruiter takes this information and has to create the job requirement if it doesn't exist. That might take two or three days to write it, review it, post it and start to field resume submissions from applicants. It might be three weeks or a month from when the posting went up based on conversations with the hiring leader before the recruiter even starts to get candidates in for interview.

The hiring leader is impatient, to say...