The Allure Of Someone Better
From Seth Godin’s Marketing your job post:
This is part of a larger trend, which is realizing that an amazing hire is worth far more than a mediocre one, or even a very good one.
My take?
There’s a difference between being noticed and succeeding.
Sometimes you need to be noticed far and wide in order to succeed. That’s why some TV ads for low-involvement products are noisy or funny or over the top.
Often though, especially for something like a job, I think that sacrificing your message in order to get noticed is a mistake. Making a video that tries to be funny in order to spread doesn’t necessarily get you the right applicants.
He’s right – this strategic approach is to be broad and wide which will lead to many respondents. I suppose the hiring company believes they will then sift through the overwhelming response and find the proverbial needle in the resume haystack.
Here is something I often tell prospects – If we were able to do our job perfectly, you would only interview 1 amazing candidate and you would hire him or her. But we’re not that good so you may have to interview 2 or 3 of them.
But hiring managers usually do not take this approach. We have had many customers who have hired the first candidate, but not before interviewing 2 or 3 more candidates. The hiring manager, when presented with an amazing candidate, still hesitates in their decision. Instead, he or she seeks to reaffirm their impending decision by comparing this strong candidate with other candidates.
The allure is that there is someone better in the marketplace. There is. Yet this allure, if unchecked, leads to a hiring treadmill where no candidate is ever quite a fit. Do not succumb to this trap – hire the amazing candidate you have identified even if they are the one and only option.
Posted By Derrick Moe | Hiring,Hiring Salespeople | | 
Comments(2)
Amy Gahran at the Poynter Institute is worth reading every day – but her blog about “Roanoke Times: Coolest Job Ad Ever” – is worth watching right now. You guys are the experts, so I don’t know if this ad fits Godin’s point of “Making a video that tries to be funny in order to spread doesn’t necessarily get you the right applicants.”
Is the point of this ad (and you have to click through in her article and watch the ad – no, seriously, you have to watch the ad, OK?!) just to cast a wide net for a larger group of candidates, or is the purpose of this ad something else entirely?
Watch this, and you’ll probably forget about the topic altogether and start thinking about marketing issues, the future of video in advertising, how customers (not just future employees) can be reached and even how the heck you’ll look on your own video when you figure out how to replicate it – sorry, when you figure out how to use it as inspiration.
Michael – thanks for the heads up on the Roanoke ad. That ad is incredibly clever and certainly worth the time to view it and click around.
I think one thing that might be in play here is that it is a newspaper looking to hire a creative person. Newspapers are regularly ridiculed in the blogosphere for their antiquated ways (and rightly so in my opinion). I think in this situation, the “wide net” approach serves the newspaper well to break through their industry’s stereotpyes.
You’re right in your comment – I started thinking about our marketing approach immediately. Kudos to the Roanoke Times for creating a category-buster of an ad.