I love a niche search. Give me a role where you need a SCADA engineer who can moonlight as a technical writer, a web developer, and a Portuguese translator simultaneously, and my eyes will light up. But there is one search that always scares me: Finding a great recruiter.
I've thought long and hard about why this search is so hard. I think it's because we want something that doesn't exist. Let me explain.
When you're part of a small company, culture is everything. Skills are truly secondary to a good culture fit. You want team players, personally-invested sweethearts who really care about the company's growth. Yet (even though you might not want to admit it), you also want a tiger. Not the snarky kind that will poach candidates, but someone hungry to produce and make money, someone self-driven, self-managed, and competitive. Tigers are necessary for a small company's survival.
You're looking for a tiger who's a sweetheart. How in hell do you find those two personalities incarnate in one person? You'll spend days and nights interviewing super nice candidates and their super growly counterparts, hire none of them, and end up with an existing team that will buckle under the (often unspoken) bandwidth pressure.
So do you hire producers with the hope that they will become passionate about the team and company, or do you hire sweethearts, and cultivate them into competitors? Bluntly put, I believe it's hard to turn a sweetheart into a tiger. More and more, I'm convinced you must hire the tiger, and slowly cultivate their inner sweetheart with systematic team building and group incentives. Short of hiring schizophrenics or Gemini's on purpose, it's your only shot at having both.
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