Unicorns are everywhere, if you know how to look

Unicorn, rockstar, purple squirrel. No matter what you call them, every hiring team has an ideal candidate in mind, but few dare to dream that they’d actually be able to find them. A competitive landscape, combined with the constraints of limited resources and time, is enough to convince many hiring teams that their ideal candidate is more mythical creature than an aspirational hire — especially in tech.

Part of the challenge with finding the “perfect” candidate, however, lies in how organizations define their ideal employee. In the past, companies were constrained by the tools they had at their disposal — essentially humans, and to some extent computers, scanning through resumes. It’s impossible to expect a team of any size to scrutinize every single resume that crosses their desk without deploying some sort of system to help sift out the most likely successful candidates.

Screening by certain educational backgrounds, resume formatting, and even specific keywords have been regularly employed by recruiters and hiring teams to help cut through the noise and hopefully find the best candidate. The problem is, blanket filtering like this not only excludes potential diamonds in the rough, it also promotes a less inclusive and ultimately, very un-unicorn workplace.

Many companies have elevated the idea of the ideal candidate to mythological status, when, in reality, the unicorns of the world aren’t mythical creatures at all — it’s just that most hiring teams don’t know the right questions to ask to uncover them. (Hint: it probably has nothing to do with educational pedigree.)

In reality, unicorns aren’t mythical creatures, they just don’t look the way we think they do — and they may as well be extinct or mythical if you don’t know how to recognize them. By changing your hiring strategy and widening your net, you’ll be amazed at the incredible candidates you’ll find that you might never have considered before. Here’s how to start.

Throw out your assumptions

One of the best ways to discover new talent is to look where you’ve never considered before. Review your “requirements” section of a job posting and nix anything that isn’t actually required. If you’re feeling bold, consider omitting the requirements altogether — it’s been shown that some candidates won’t even bother applying for a position unless they meet 100% of the required qualifications. Once you remove this first barrier, you open the position up to anyone and everyone. But don’t worry, weeding out the top candidates doesn’t have to be a full-time job, keep reading.

Test it out

Part of the beauty — and challenge — of opening your search to anyone that sees the posting is that you’ve potentially increased your reach of candidates far beyond what your team can manage.

That’s where assessments will become your new favorite tool. No matter how much interest you’ve received for a position, there’s an easy way to surface the best candidates to the top: test their skills in a real-world scenario.

Many companies utilize coding challenges or puzzles to assess a candidate’s abilities. While these can provide some insight, they don’t tell you what you really need to know: can they do the work on a day-to-day basis? A test that will quickly identify the key skills and abilities required for the role will automatically provide valuable information about each applicant’s potential, and get you one step closer to finding your unicorn.

Work it out

As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. There’s really no way to know how well a candidate will perform until you see them in action. But you don’t have to hire them to figure that out. Identify a few key tasks that the role requires and schedule time with the candidate, either in person or remotely, and watch them work. Collaborate with them and observe how they’d get the job done. By putting candidates in realistic situations with the tools and technology they’re used to using, you’ll see them in a more natural environment and get a much better sense for their fit with your organization.

The unicorns are out there

Unicorns aren’t a myth, it’s just that they’re so often misrepresented that many of us wouldn’t recognize them if they were standing next to us. The challenge for hiring teams has never been with the lack of qualified talent, but rather the means by which we’ve been seeking that talent. By evolving hiring strategies hiring teams can turn the myth of hiring a unicorn into reality.

Want to learn more about Lytmus?

If you’d like to learn more about Lytmus and how the platform can help you hire better candidates fast, contact us to request a free demo.