Here are 3 reasons why:
1. YOU DON’T ACTUALLY NEED THE HIRE
You thought you needed it, but after months of pushing it out, it seems your company is functioning just fine.
Maybe the team was bloated, and when that one person left, you accidentally right-sized.
Maybe a young superstar (see #3 below) has picked up the slack and needs a raise instead of a new boss.
“A good, quick, small team can beat a big slow team anytime.” Paul Bryant
2. YOU DON’T HAVE A PROCESS FOR HIRING
Content deadline? Final sample sign-off? Crystal clear. You’ve got a process for those things.
But recruiting… maybe that’s murky.
Recruiting might not be in anybody’s job title, so when you ask your CD to help recruit a GD, to them it feels like a burden on top of their real job.
Maybe you do have a talent acquisition manager, but since they’ve never actually been a Designer, the assignment to “sift through 800 Creative Director applications and weed out the impostors” might not be a fair one.
When faced with a giant stack of responsibilities, your employees gravitate to the clear directives and postpone the ambiguous ones.
Recruiting gets punted. Time passes. Whatever great candidates you did have, have lost patience and gone elsewhere.
Not 100% certain about the perfect recruiting process, and can’t hire professional help? Just make a bullet-point plan of attack and get started.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” George S. Patton
3. YOU HAVEN’T FOUND THE RIGHT PERSON
Your needs are unique, and your applicants are just… applicants.
You hired a recruiter but they sent you 17 resumes in 9 separate emails with no color commentary.
There’s no shortage of candidates, but the difference between top talent and jobseekers is making itself obvious.
You regret asking “know anybody who might be interested?” when your real question was “know anybody who’s uniquely built for this?”
It’s worth the effort though. Aligning an exemplary person with a high-stakes role is the best way a leader can spend their energy, because everywhere you look, a few key people are driving the majority of results.
“In any group of people, approximately 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people in the group.” - Price’s Law.
