The Only Two Hiring Strategies

There are only two choices of hiring strategies.

Acquire the Talent You Need

The first strategy is to hire the talent that you need.

You can find people who already have the skills and experience to deliver the results you need. This likely means you pay more to acquire new hires. When people have the skills and experience, they demand higher wages. And, you usually have to identify and hire passive candidates, because the people you want to hire are already working.

This seems like the best strategy. It seems like hiring people with the talent you need is the fastest and surest way to build your team, but it isn’t always true. There is another choice that works as well, and sometimes better.

Build the Talent You Need

The second strategy is to build the talent you need.

This strategy depends entirely on your ability to find people with the right mindset and teach, train, coach, and develop them in the roles that you need them to play.

If you are going to build them, you are going to have to find people who can and will grow quickly, or you have to have a set of roles which they can pass through to acquire the skills they need on their way into greater roles.

Choices

You have to make the choice to execute one or both of these strategies.

There is no effective hiring strategy that is built on hiring people without the skills and experience without a development plan to help them acquire those skills.

You can choose to acquire the talent you need. You can choose to build the talent you need. Or you can choose to both acquire and develop the talent you need. But you can’t choose not to have a hiring strategy.