I remember jokingly telling my good friend, "I'm a little upset I wasn't part of the selection process!" We were sitting on the tailgate of his truck drinking a beer, discussing his engagement to the girl of his dreams. I was on vacation when the proposal went down, and he hadn't given me any notice it was happening. I didn't expect anything to transpire so soon. My buddy is a very calculating kind of person and their courtship was rather brief, he didn't even introduce me too her! "She's the one", he said. "Smart, beautiful, she cares about me and I love her family. This is the kind of girl I want to be my partner and a Mom to my kids, so I locked it up." I asked the number one question any guy asks another guy when it comes to marriage. "But what if you meet someone better?" His reply made so much sense. "That won't happen because I've stopped looking. I found my wife."

As a recruiting leader, analogies are my best friend. I use them to train my team and to educate clients. While the above example may be a bit personal, it's a spot on comparison to a company trying to fill key roles within their organization. Are you aware it's a candidate's market? If you're a hiring authority you certainly are. In my almost ten years of doing this I've never seen the market so hot for tech talent, especially in the super competitive spaces like software development. So far in 2015 I've witnessed at least a dozen hiring managers indirectly crush their teams productivity due to indecisiveness. It starts something like this.

"We love Karen, but since she's only the second person we've seen for this position we need more candidates for comparison."

This unfortunately kicks off a vicious cycle of time passing, wheels spinning, and a job going unfilled. Karen has a lot of suitors. Some of these suitors understand the market better than their competition, and when THEY meet Karen it's Beyonce' time...They're gonna put a ring on it. Here's my top three points for all the Waffle House managers who need some understanding. 

1) Candidates want to be wanted

I took my job at Modis because my boss told me to my face he had to have me on his team and we would do big things together. It was the best decision I've ever made. Let's get back to the love analogy, how do you think an engagement is going to pan out if you tell your would be spouse that you really like them but want to see other people? Even if you do end up hiring them, your employee starts out their tenure at a new job thinking they're boss simply settled for them. I would not advise any relationships to start this way, whether they be business or personal.

2) You are killing the people who already work for you

If you think one empty chair on your technical team is bad, wait until you have to deal with four. Every day your job goes unfilled is another day your team has to work that much harder to hit a deadline, ship some code, fix a problem. Employees simply...do...not...have to deal with poor management decisions when it comes to team building, there are thousands of open arms ready to embrace them. I've seen unfilled jobs close a corporations doors.

3) You may not know what you want

" I need a Scrum certified Project Manager/Business Analyst  who can code Javascript, native iOS mobile apps, and test software." Yeah, who doesn't. It's very important to separate the "must have skills" from the "wow I sure wish" skills. What are the mission critical pieces a candidate needs to do your job? You need to start and stop there. Pluses are great, and it's awesome if a company can get a bunch of extra skills as they hire for the core ones, but let's keep it real. Your mobile app needs are in the distant future, and you have existing coders who would LOVE to pick up new Javascript skills if their managers would just give them a chance. Scrum certifications are nice, but are you really going to pass on a candidate with good Agile experience because they don'e have a piece of paper to put on the wall? Focus on the skills that will make or break, that will get your job filled while simultaneously guarding the sanity of your existing team.