Searching for a unicorn?

“I just need a nice looking, young female to sit on reception and greet customers.” This was a vacancy brief I received in my first ever job in recruitment, I’m horrified that I wasn’t more horrified at the time, but I’ve learned a lot since then.

It’s easy to get caught up in what you ‘think’ you want, especially if you’ve always got what you want.

For example, let’s just say you’ve received a letter of notice from your Accountant Lesley. You’re thinking: “Ok, I need a direct replacement, someone exactly like Lesley, as she’s brilliant and does a great job.” So, think about it – “Lesley has been our stand-alone Accountant for over ten years, she’s AAT qualified, got a degree and has also comes from a legal background.” – all fair criteria.

But Lesley also wears glasses, has an unusual attachment to the colour purple and eats quavers for breakfast. Ok, so you don’t care what someone eats for breakfast (unless it effects their performance or the office air purity) but sometimes, it’s hard to decipher between essential criteria and non-essential criteria. You want a direct replacement for Lesley as you think she’s perfect, so you try match everything about her, but, someone totally different might do the job just as well, maybe even better.

The other thing you might fail to do when replacing someone is think about what that person was like when they first joined. It would be great to get someone who’s been doing the job already for ten years but guess what- that person’s Lesley and she’s leaving, time to get over it. But when she first started did she know how the Payroll system worked, where the balance sheet was stored or how to avoid bumping into Patrick in the kitchen else be stuck there talking ‘Bake Off’ all afternoon – no, she didn’t.

So below, I’ve busted some of the most common candidate stereotyping to help you, well, not stereotype-

1.      “Too old/over experienced” – Ok, so many of you are getting the hang of discriminating indirectly by switching phrases like ‘too old’ for phrases like ‘too much experience’ instead. That doesn’t make it okay!

What you’re essentially doing is thinking that someone with a certain amount of experience or above a certain age might be less hungry, less energised, less excited about getting stuck in, not as social with team members, not as eager to learn or wanting to progress their career. But these attributes aren’t a reflection of age nor experience. I know plenty of experienced older candidates with all of the above and I know many younger inexperienced ones who lack any sort of get up and go. Remember, these are personality traits, which can change over time, true, but assess the current state of them of the individual in front of you – never assume.

2.      “I know other people from that company and they’re not right” – Ok, so would you say you are cut from the same cloth as every single other employee within the business you’re currently work for? No, probably not. Businesses are made up of a hugely complex and diverse sets of skills, backgrounds and characters. A person isn’t the business they work for, they are themselves, so treat them that way.

3.      Name discrimination. A test ran by the BBC last year found that when two identically skilled and experienced candidates applied for 100 jobs respectively, the candidate named ‘Adam’ got offered three times the number of interviews as the candidate named ‘Mohamed’. Research by the University of Bristol showed that Muslim men are 76% less likely to be employed than their white Christian counterparts, yet there are over 4m Muslims in the UK, meaning businesses could be missing out on exceptional talent. Don’t be subconsciously guilty of this, as Shakespeare says; what’s in a name?

4.      They’re ‘jumpy’. You’re not suggesting they’re giving Tigger a jump for his money, so what are you saying? I think what you mean is that if a candidate has moved jobs too often, in quick succession or has gaps in employment that they’re bad news. I would totally agree that these ‘jumps’ need to be addressed- so make sure you do that. But did you know that 1,543 mergers and acquisitions took place in Britain last year, which can explain some of these jumps along with redundancies, so depending on the rest of the CV and skill set, maybe do some more digging before discounting someone on that basis alone.

Recruiting is a time consuming and all-encompassing exercise (hence why people like me make a full time living out of it) but take away some of the above restrictions you put on yourself and you may find your talent pool suddenly increases and you’ll be surprised at the gems you could find.

Happy hunting!