Let's face it: most of the companies out there (including most of the ones I worked for) hire opportunistically. They wait until they have a specific need, then quickly put together a job description, and publish the opening in the various channels that are readily accessible, hoping that they get a fit. Most of the time they can't find what they are looking for in a reasonable amount of time, and for the right salary. There's four options available at that point:

• Hire someone who is available now, but not as strong a fit as you would like, and hope to grow them into the role later (i.e. compromise on the required skill set).
• Hire someone very senior who has the right skill set (often exceeds the right skill set), but is significantly more expensive (i.e. compromise on the salary).
• Hire a contractor as a temporary solution, while you are still looking for that ideal candidate (once again compromising on the financial side).
• Abandon the role completely, and find some other way of dealing with the requirements (either by outsourcing the corresponding work, or distributing it among various existing team members that individually have parts of the required skills).

The problem is that all of these options are sub-optimal by quite a margin. If push comes to shove, I would prefer hiring someone without the complete skill set and growing him/her, or if there is room to throw money at the problem, hire a contractor. Nonetheless, these are not good options either; they are simply the best of what's left. The ideal scenario would be to never find yourself in this situation in the first place.

It's worth noting that in addition to the mismatches mentioned above, there are also a couple of second order effects, both of which strongly impact culture. To begin with, cultural fit is a very tempting target to compromise on. When a company is faced with the choice between someone who is a strong cultural fit, but is missing part of the skill set, and someone who has more of the required skills but is not a good cultural fit, they will often opt for the second. This is hardly surprising once you realize that opportunistic hiring is often a reaction to a missing skill set (or missing capacity in a skill set, even if the skill set exists). The second effect is caused by the time delay in hiring: unless the company got lucky and found exactly what they were looking for, they are probably already behind the deadline dictated by the needs by the time they hire someone (sub-optimal as the fit may be). This means that there is little time for on-boarding, which is one of the few methods by which you can avoid cultural dilution. As a result, culture takes a double hit.

So, how does one prevent this situation in the first place? In my opinion, the answer lies in creating and executing a long-term strategy that organizes the process better. This strategy should address all the relevant challenges into a coherent approach, that can then be planned and executed. Note that the original opportunistic approach is often referred to as the “Spray and Pray” strategy in recruiting circles, but as it does not have an organized way of addressing the major challenges, it does not fit our definition of a hiring strategy.

The first challenge to tackle is predicting the need. If you go back a couple of paragraphs, you will notice that a significant portion of the problem is simply that, in opportunistic hiring, the company is simply reacting to an existing need. But there is rarely a good reason why a need would develop unexpectedly. Generally, it should be possible to look at the other strategies of the company (primarily the sales, product, and service strategies), and forecast the hiring needs quite accurately. With this forecast at hand, the company can plan the hiring, and begin the process with sufficient time before the need develops, to be able to fulfill the position at about the right time. Getting this right means that you need to develop a quantitative idea of how long it takes to fulfill which kinds of positions. This implies that you instrument the hiring process to measure the relevant KPIs, and an understanding of how to use them.

The second challenge to address is develop a clear idea of what kind of people you need. This will once again depend on what kind of department strategies the company is trying to execute, as part of the overall business strategy. For example, if all of your software needs are simple, for internal use only, and not mission critical, then it might not make financial sense to hire top talent at premium prices. On the other hand, if you are offering primarily a technical consulting service, where the engineers are your biggest assets, are directly billable at high rates, and are the main driver of success for your customers, then you want the very best people you can get, and are willing to pay a significant premium for them. If the cost of failures is high, you probably need to target very experienced people - in general they know more of the ways in which one could get in trouble, and are, therefore, better at avoiding them. At the same time, they tend to be more expensive, less flexible, and less willing to take risks. On the other hand, if the cost of failure is fairly low and the desire for experimentation fairly high, you may want to hire younger, less experienced people. They tend to be more willing to take risks, but will make mistakes more frequently. As a side-benefit, they are usually cheaper. Note that most companies will have different groups with different needs, so they will be executing multiple strategies at the same time. It is also very important to be honest about what you really need and what you are really implementing as a strategy. I have seen many companies that say they want “younger” people, but in reality they criterion they look at most is salary expectations. Incidentally, age is a protected category in quite a few countries, and making hiring decisions on the basis of age is actually a violation of the law.

The third challenge is keeping the demands realistic. Job requirements are combinatoric filters: every time you add a requirement to a job description, the size of the pool of available candidates goes down by a large factor. In Switzerland I saw multiple postings which, along with all the other requirements, also demanded business fluency in German, Italian, French, and English. While the first three are official languages, in reality the majority of people are business fluent in one, and have some knowledge of another. There is a small percentage that is business fluent in two, and an infinitesimally small number that is business fluent in all three. The demand for so called “Jesus profiles” is especially common in leadership positions. Often, candidates are asked for a lifetime of domain expertise (e.g. 20 years in insurance), extensive experience in managing and mentoring people, specific experience in specific technologies, pre-sales or sales experience, experience with large multinationals, strategy experience, significant P&L responsibility, significant exposure to clients, willingness to travel up to 60%, and so on (this is based on a real posting). The problem is that, even if you could find one or two of the very few individuals that meet that criteria, they will most likely already have jobs. And even if you find one that is willing to leave, you will have to compete with an entire industry to get him/her. And doing so will be very expensive. First of all, separate your requirements into must-haves and nice to have. If you don't and you have a list of 10 or more requirements, your implicit strategy is that people will ignore the fact that they don't meet some of them, and apply anyway. The problem with this is that what gets ignored gets picked by the candidate, not by you. It is much simpler to compromise on some of the requirements that are either not essential, or you can teach once the person is hired. My favorite target is domain expertise: if you are hiring a back-end engineer for an e-commerce business, do you really need them to know (before they come to you) the intricacies of on-line retail? My guess is that the knowledge is useful but incidental, and that the company is brimming with people that have that knowledge and could teach the new hires. Also, think long and hard about what you consider a must-have: it should be reserved for the kind of requirement that, if you can't find, you will give up on trying to hire for that role! In general, if your job description has more than 5 must-haves, you are going to have a hard-time finding someone. You should have a plan for how to address this. Either you should be willing to pay your way to overcoming competition and resistance, or you should be willing to spend a lot of time to fill the position. And since finding the candidates will be a big part of the challenge, consider hiring recruiters or an executive search firm.

The fourth challenge should be developing your channels. There is a remarkable number of companies that simply post job openings on the company web-page, LinkedIn, and the major job boards, and hope that candidates will simply flock to their door. Do you actually keep track of which channels are effective for which positions? Note that this interacts strongly with the type of people you are trying to find, so the strategy should have coherent approaches for these two challenges. For example, if you are looking for medical professionals, your generic local job board is probably not your best option. If you are looking for experienced professionals, I would advise against focusing on job fairs. A special note on the company web-site: unless you have an unusually strong employer brand (think Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), your company web-page is not enough. It doesn't matter how attractive you think you are as a company; all that matters is how attractive the candidate thinks you are. Most candidates will consider searching your company web site as doubling their effort for minimal return, unless they are so interested working for you that they are unwilling to risk missing a post. For the hard-to-find specializations (e.g., aviation machinist), you should certainly consider creating a candidate pool that you can tap into by engaging people as the opportunity arises, and getting them to agree to be in such a pool. And as mentioned before, for the really hard leadership profiles I would consider retaining and executive search firm. They invest in maintaining a pool of desirable candidates that they can tap into on your behalf. Conversely, for profiles that are fairly common (e.g., gastronomy, retail, etc.), the complexity of maintaining a talent pool hardly seems to be worth it. In short, the more specialized the profile, the more you should invest in refining and developing the channels for finding candidates.

The fifth challenge should be dealing with the competition. Unless your hiring strategy is OK with the average candidate, you should keep in mind that the candidates you like are the candidates that everyone else is going to like as well. First of all, figure out how to get their attention enough to get them to apply. Also reduce all friction in the process. I find it incredible that there are so many companies out there that use all of these optimization concepts day in and day out to increase sales, but forget that the same optimizations apply to hiring. Think about what makes you uniquely interesting to the kind of candidates you are looking for. Once again, the approach here must be coherent with the type of people you are looking for. If you are looking for young, adventurous innovators it does not make sense to be pitching your retirement benefits. And vice-versa - if you are looking for seasoned professionals, focusing on the ping-pong tables on the third floor is probably not going to yield results. Think about developing an employer brand to help you stand out from the noise. And above all, think about how you are going to close the deal once you have found the right candidate, realizing that they will almost certainly have other offers to consider at the same time. What levers are you planning to use to compete: compensation, work-environment, interesting work, flexibility, benefits, career opportunities, or something else entirely (e.g., a non-profit competing by benefiting a cause)? There are a lot of companies that simply do not address the challenge at all; in the end they end up hiring the people that simply did not have any other options. I still recall a discussion on turnover with an HR person in a company I worked for, which ended with them saying: “What are they going to do? We're the only company hiring English-speakers in this area!” At least it's a competitive strategy, even if I find it disagreeable.

There is many other challenges to tackle, not the least of which are cultural fit, and retainment, but I think there is little value in listing all of them. The important thing to remember is that many of these challenges interact with each other, so the approaches for each have to be coherent with each other. Unfortunately, there are a large number of companies (usually SMEs) that have no discernible hiring strategy, so there are no synergies between approaches. Even worse, sometimes the approaches work against each other. Of the companies that have a strategy, a surprising portion of them do not have coherent strategies because some of the challenges are tackled by HR, and others by the business line leaders, with no coordination. At the end of the day, the majority of the companies I know seem to be struggling with some part of hiring or another. And above all, avoid having to hire reactively at all costs!