After completing hundreds of successful executive searches, we’ve seen a particular kind of “aha” moment happen time and again. When given the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in relevant business contexts, the candidate with the least familiar elements on their resume often proves to bring the most value to the team.

It’s the good surprises in hiring that tell you you’re doing something right.

Traditional hiring practices favor candidates with easy confidence, familiar career paths, or any number of attributes people mistakenly equate with job success, leaving less conventional candidates out of the game. But our competency-driven approach levels the playing field and allows these “aha” moments to emerge.

When teams have a wide range of perspectives to draw from, they work harder and smarter—that’s what drives business results. And that’s precisely what we emphasize in the search process.

Learn more about the link between diversity, team performance, and a skills-based approach in our Case for Competency-Driven Hiring.

“Diverse perspectives are proven to make teams stronger, but traditional hiring practices methodically eliminate them, leading to an empty exercise that lacks valuable insights. You want the unexpected to happen in hiring; that’s where innovation and growth happens.”

— Staffing Advisors President Bob Corlett

Where Traditional Hiring Goes Wrong

It may not be intentional, but traditional hiring practices limit your potential to discover exceptional talent. And it compounds at each step of the process. Here’s how:

  • Job descriptions are usually developed by observing the most recent person in the role or borrowing from similar job postings. But the actual challenges of the position are often entirely different.
  • Based on the inaccurate or vague job description, job advertising fails to describe the impact of the role and why a top-performing candidate would want to consider it.
  • Candidates who may or may not be qualified submit resumes without a real understanding of the work.
  • Lacking experience with skills-based interviewing, hiring teams default to scanning resumes for requirements like degrees and years of experience, overlooking candidates who have the right skills but took less familiar career paths. This both narrows and homogenizes the candidate pool.
  • Interviews typically lack appropriate structure, and discussions veer into finding common ground with candidates. Job performance expectations are rarely tested in a data-based, measurable way.
  • Post-interview discussions tend to focus on personal opinions, such as who the interviewers liked.
  • Organizations take on unnecessary hiring risk, favoring candidates that “fit” their picture of who could succeed in the role without objectively evaluating their competencies and job-relevant soft skills.

At every step, candidates with familiar credentials tend to advance, while those who could bring fresh perspectives to the team are inadvertently filtered out. And with each new hire, the same ineffective cycle continues.

But it doesn’t have to.

What Happens When We Get Hiring Right?

At Staffing Advisors, we think the best searches are full of “aha” moments—when clients begin to expect the (pleasantly) unexpected. Here’s how we turn the tables:

  • We dive deep into what really drives impact in the role and explore the true challenges of the work.
  • We leverage our team’s deep expertise across all functional areas and career levels to develop a job description that clearly outlines performance expectations.
  • We distill those insights into job advertising that shows the potential for impact and inspires highly qualified candidates.
  • Top performers are drawn to that potential, and candidates who submit their resumes have a much deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities inherent in the work.
  • We conduct an intensive research process to surface hundreds more candidates from a range of backgrounds and expand the candidate pool far beyond ad response.
  • We facilitate a competency-driven interview sequence that delivers clear data about each candidate’s abilities and job-relevant soft skills.
  • We guide hiring managers to be more inclusive in their thinking, challenge assumptions, and expand their views about who can do the job and the possible paths to get there. This allows managers to engage with candidates who can help them think about the work in new ways.
  • Organizations hire top-performing candidates who meaningfully enhance their teams with different perspectives and unique problem-solving approaches.

With each new hire, this approach embeds a different sort of hiring cycle into the culture of your organization, one that embraces the unexpected and turns surprises into strengths. It allows you to consider a larger and more diverse pool of people while raising the standard of what it means to drive impact in the role. And it supports diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on a structural and sustainable level while opening doors to innovative thinking that can propel your organization forward.

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