The Best People for a Job
A hint: they do not exist.
Remember this: we are not better or worse, just different. Therefore, you are only looking for the candidate who is more suitable to your needs. But he or she are not better than the rest. And I’ll give you an example. Take a look.
The company I was working on was hiring an IT support analyst, and I was in charge of asking the technical questions. We were down to 2 candidates: the first one, a newly-graduated computer engineer; the second one, an average computer programmer who was stucked between jobs. They both needed the job, and we -computer scientists- know that you never get to ‘love’ Tech Support. It is hard, difficult, requires a lot of patience and a strong sense of detachment from your job; otherwise you will end up taking every complaint personally and you will quit or get fired. I have seen it many times before.
Hence, when it came to evaluating who was “the best one” for the job I knew that the both of them had pros and cons, both of them were going to be difficult to work with for different reasons (arrogance, pusillanimity, under-experienced, and so on) but what I needed was to figure out which one of them will give me more peace of mind, which one of them will do what the job requires but also provide some sense of assurance.
In the end, I preferred someone who I was pretty sure would leave us as soon as he would get a job in his field of expertise, rather than someone who would have tried to tell us what we were doing wrong, instead of actually doing it. And Human Resources agreed.
As you can see -or maybe not- they both were prepared, skilfull, and very professional people. But one was not better or worse than the other. They both were pretty bad choices, if you see it like most companies would. I did not, and I found out that there wasn’t going to be anyone “perfect” for this job, because it was not a perfect job. The “best” professional wouldn’t want a “shitty” job. And again, that best professional is actually not the best. They are just different.
So the next time you are posting jobs, or applying for one, remember that you are applying as (or asking for) the most suitable one for it, because the best candidate does not exist.
P.S: Some might even say that the best jobs are already taken, so why should you be asking for “the best candidate” for a not-so-good job?
And as everyone would say, if you like what you just read -or hated it- let me know by clicking the heart button below, or just leave a nasty comment. I can take a hit.
