The Legendary "Ideal Candidate"

"The ideal candidate will possess..."

It's amusing to me that we still write job adverts that way. It feels very old-timey. Indeed the whole requirements list of a job description seems outdated, and reminds me of the kind of lonely hearts ads that ran in newspapers before the invention of more effective digital solutions: "Lonely bachelor seeks attractive woman with GSOH. Must be able to cook". There's something in the phrasing of lonely-hearts ads and traditional job adverts which makes them difficult to take seriously. The world of dating has moved on considerably, and Tinder profiles are radically more authentic in tone.

Yet we still write about "ideal candidates".

There are no ideal humans, no ideal partners, no ideal hires and ergo, no such thing as an ideal candidate.

If this were simply a matter of phrasing, you might accuse your correspondent of pedantry. It is far more than that. When we set out hiring with an idealised and unrealistic set of hiring goals we risk missing opportunities for development, complicating processes, being led by bias and social proof, and excluding talent.

The Ideal candidate myth skews the process in such a way as to damage the ability for the business to innovate. By fostering a method of creating job descriptions which are fundamentally both functional in design (they list an often overwhelming number of todo's and how-one-gets-fired criteria) and unrealistic in nature, they discourage the sort of hiring which brings diversity in approach.

In my experience, very few roles are so straightforward as to be capturable by a fixed document. In almost all knowledge work environments, the workload and expectations are inherently fluid. Promotion and accelerated careers are given to those who have growth, learning and adaptation mindsets for precisely the reason that those skills are valued so highly by business. Yet we write job descriptions that rob the role and applicants of this agency.

Typical job descriptions do a very poor job of correctly attributing total skill usage, time spent with each skill (perhaps broken down by percentage), day-by-day, weekly, monthly or annual breakdown. When you read that sentence I kind of hope you thought "Of course they don't - that would be impossible, the roles are too complex and multifaceted for that!" And yet, that is precisely the way we try to categorise skills, and how we set out to evaluate candidates.

An example

"The ideal candidate" will possess "strong skills in X", "considerable experience of Y", and "be comfortable with Z". These lists often go on to absurd lengths to the extent I might have been better starting at  my example above with skill “A”, rather than skill “X”. Even if a candidate could make that list, meeting each criteria exactly, would that actually make them Ideal? Would meeting every single one of the criteria in your last job description make me an "Ideal candidate"? Would you be so confident of that that you'd be prepared to forego the interview entirely and just offer me the job?

Probably not. You'd cite the cultural fit factors that need to be taken into account, the various team member perspectives on collaboration.

You'd say this even though it's clearly written on your job advert that I needed those skills (and as mentioned before, we're talking about a scenario where I meet all the requirements). So then we get into a much deeper philosophical discussion of the value of interviews. If I tell you I meet all your criteria, and you are still interviewing me, is that because you don't trust me? If so, if in your opinion I am untrustworthy in some way, you shouldn't interview me at all. It's bad to work with the untrustworthy.

"We're verifying that your assessment of your abilities matches ours. After all, we might have differing perspectives on what good looks like." And yet most interviewers are untrained. They start with borrowed questions from the internet, mix up the purpose of each interview session, fail to consistently validate between interviews, and have no "bias accommodation" strategy. In short, interviewers are not even performing the basic function of establishing capability.

What they are definitely not doing is establishing grading and potential for each skill listed on the job description in any way that makes it meaningful. Plus they have no way to grade my capacity to learn what I don't know, or to realistically simulate my behaviour in a group when faced with a problem whose solution I disagree with (for example), or when I work on a set of complex problems involving clients.

If you're following this increasingly arcane argument you might realistically say "our inability to properly measure these things is why we write such long job descriptions. We are just covering our bases of all the things our people might be called upon to do and use in a given day." But if the complexity were truly appreciated and fully embraced, then each item on the job list would simply be a representative skill grouped to a larger theme. For example, whilst it definitely helps me acclimatise to the new role if I am already trained in the specific project management methodology your business uses, and have experience of the specific PM software you use, neither are vital to the problem the role solves.

For a Project Management role that problem might be "help us manage client expectations better", or "improve stakeholder engagement" or "Help different parts of the business collaborate more effectively", or "build an effective projects function". The actual ideal candidate will deliver outsize returns on that single measurable, and it will not really matter how they do so, under what methodology, or their own struggles with your software or processes.

It goes without saying that if the candidate is able to deliver on this objective what also does not matter is their race, sex, gender, age, or disability. What also does not matter, though always seems to make it into job descriptions, is the individual's education level, subject, or previous amount (or type) of experience. Again, at the fundamental level the right candidate is the one best able to deliver at a high level on the specific pain point the business needs to solve in the hire.

Sometimes, industry knowledge really can help. But what it helps with is speed of understanding (“I know the insider lingo”).

Sometimes the number of years of experience can help (“I've seen this issue before”), but it can also preclude genuine innovation.

Education background can sometimes help (via social proof) but it principally helps in lowering others resistance to change (“I have a PhD in this subject, you can trust me”).

None of these factors make any difference to my ability to deliver on the objective, they simply help reassure you, the interviewer, that I am likely to deliver on the objective.

Which brings us back to your "Ideal candidate". Every time you run a hiring campaign against your ideal candidate specification you are actively discouraging alternate perspectives, unique insight and quite possibly market-changing innovation in order to hire a candidate on the grounds of reassurance. Is your own sense of reassurance more important than the competitive advantage? Furthermore, how well statistically has your own reassurance helped ensure your hires are right?

We all get hiring wrong. The sheer complexity of dealing with whole human beings and their adaptation to changing intergroup dynamics means that some level of failure is inevitable.

Risk acceptance is one way to deal with this. Doing what one can to recognise, work around, or avoid bias is another. A third way is to do what is discussed here; stop striving for ideal in your candidates, when the actual value of ideal is only to give hiring managers a false sense of security in the hire. Instead, define the problem to be solved more specifically and then widen the net of the kinds of people who might most effectively solve it.

Do this and it's possible you might find your business spends less resources on hiring, benefits from more innovation and perspective, and achieves what your competitors can't. You might trade mythical "Ideal Candidates" for an actual great workplace.