Principal Proper Hiring

"Still, they were kind, and they taught me everything. On-the-job training like that barely exists now. Today, if you haven’t got at least five years under your belt, you won’t make the cut. People expect perfection on day one."

It's a disease. Debilitating endeavours before they've even begun. And a real bugbear of mine.

Whether it be for that ultra exciting unique startup, or anywhere along the range to the bluest of empire spanning Enterprise chips, there is a recurrent flaw in the field of recruitment. Compounded by others, but let's start with this foulest of traps.

For every role opened a firm demands to find someone who's done exactly the same thing as required here and now, in a seemingly twin environment, for the past five years.

It is lunacy.

The quote above comes via London broadsheet confessional [sub'n req'd] from inside the secretive world of the billionaire factotum.

Where once we had secretary. Then assistants, becoming personal then executive. Now for the super wealthy elite, combining butlerian discretion, decorum and devotion with the project management, problem solving and sourcing skills of a demon silver screen spy.

If even their world is beset by this infection, what hope the rest of us?

Perhaps echoed in no small measure throughout our space, such clients, known as principals, are intolerant of hearing 'no'.

In recruiting many a salesperson over three decades I can attest that overwhelmingly, those taken on claiming to have done eerily similar before have been far outstripped in performance by those coming very much from the lateral.

Outside of Sales, there appear functions where such direct transfers are effective, even mandated. Yet within our walls, the imbalance has taken dangerous root.

The tension so vital to stellar success between the fresher which initial realignment represents and the wizened where sector familiarity exists feels today out of kilter.

Recruiting right is so tough in selling, don't make it even harder. Explain this to whoever writes your specs. Else all you make are milkrounder-cum-journeymen's days, any agent commissions fatter, and your targets ever more distant.