Some companies have a policy of hiring good people, even if they're not a close march for an open position; and of not hiring weak candidates, even if the hiring manager is desperate. That is, they hire good people when they come available, and never knowingly hire bad people. Hiring for a specific vacancy is silly - good people are adaptable.
So I think that's a great policy, if you have enough money to cover the periods when good staff are cheap and available, and your vacancy list is short. You don't have to fire the dross, because you don't ever hire dross.
Some companies have a policy of hiring good people, even if they're not a close march for an open position; and of not hiring weak candidates, even if the hiring manager is desperate. That is, they hire good people when they come available, and never knowingly hire bad people.
How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
It’s different because some firms will choose someone who is just good enough over someone who is super talented if the former has domain knowledge and the latter doesn’t. It’s all about how adaptable you think people are.
If you need a database developer and some junior person who has a couple of indistinguished but relevant jobs on their resume shows up, do you take them over the person who has no database development at all but a decade of lisp with some very high powered firms?
Some firms will choose the latter because they believe highly talented people can adapt. Some don’t.
Plenty of companies will send your application right into the trash heap if your skills/experience aren't a close match (regardless of whether the required skills are trivial to learn)
Welcome to real life where you do not set your own budget. The reality is choosing someone who you feel can do a good enough job to make it worth your time, rather than just doing it yourself.
> How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
For some companies the job is "maintain the team at X people, so when we're below that hire the best people we can find in a reasonable time, and when we're above that we close hiring".
I see a lot of this in consulting. A client will say they need skills A, B, and C. We know that X, Y and Z are skills that we see paying dividends in consultants over the long term. But we hire the A, B, C developer because that's specifically what the immediate project demands for rather than what is a good fit for our consulting practice over time. Trying to place those folks after their initial engagement is a lot of work and leads to higher turnover as a result.
So I think that's a great policy, if you have enough money to cover the periods when good staff are cheap and available, and your vacancy list is short. You don't have to fire the dross, because you don't ever hire dross.