Don’t Hire a Marginal Candidate
(2 Min Read) And why it's worse than not hiring at all.
Note: If you are offended by the title, please read the next paragraph before leaving a comment. I received a lot of comments and DMs on my previous post on How to Catch A Cheating Candidate justifying cheating. I disagree and still stand that cheating is unacceptable. Few comments highlighted that cheating allows marginal candidates to get a job. This post is a follow-up on those comments.
By marginal candidates, I mean the marginal candidates w.r.t. the job they are being hired to do. I believe a marginal candidate is a job profile mismatch.
Often, when someone is unsuccessful in a given position/role, it's not because they are incompetent. It's because there is a miss-alignment between what they can do and what job requires them to do.
A few straightforward examples are hiring a front-end engineer to do backend work or vice-versa or a salesperson to do IT work. These examples have noticeable misalignment between roles and skills.
However, it gets tricky when hiring for a specific role, say server or data engineer, and the candidate does have some of those skills, i.e., can write code or SQL commands.
In such cases, the candidate will barely solve or fail at the problem during the interview. They will be struggling, and maybe you will give them a hint which barely helps them cross the finish line. Either way, you know they are right at the border.
Non-desperate hiring managers tend to pick on this. They either look to get a better signal during onsite interviews or just outright pass on the candidate. But if you are in a desperate situation, there is a possibility to overlook this signal entirely. And that's a mistake. We don't want to lower the bar doesn't matter how desperate the situation may get.
The right candidate for the job is worth the wait.
Now you may say, I can't wait six months to 1 year to fill a position.
I say we can. And if we haven't filled the position in 6 months, take a look at the job description. The requirements may have changed. We want to ensure that we are hiring for the correct position.
The downside of marginal candidate
While the hiring manager may get a new hire under the belt, a marginal candidate needs a lot of guidance, coaching, and time to develop the required skills. This is assuming they are internally motivated to learn new skills which don't last long.
The hiring manager/team ends up spending a lot of energy on them. In the worst case, it ends up in a performance improvement plan (PIP), and the best case is you have an average employee.
For candidates, it's even worse. They know they are performing marginally. And that's not good for anyone's confidence. The same candidate correctly matched would have excelled in the correct position. So by hiring a marginal candidate, we are not doing them any favors either.
The Exception
There are always exceptions. It's possible that a candidate was nervous during interviews and froze. Later, when hired, they excel. While there is some probability of that happening, would you bet on it if the situation was non-desperate?
The best way to avoid such situations and hence the post, don’t hire marginal candidates.
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