Exploring the Candidate Bill of Rights (Part 5)

…continuing my running commentary on the ItzBIG Blog series of articles on the Candidate Bill of Rights.  So far we have covered of the series we looked at confidentiality, credibility, accuracy, and consideration.  Today we examine ItzBIG’s commentary on “Consistency.”

Consistency
Hiring decisions will be made based upon on a set of specific and defined criteria that is relevant to the position, consistent across all candidates and applied objectively.

It seems that consistency in hiring practices is sadly lacking or altogether missing in startup companies.  Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with that.  Seems to me that many, in fact most, of the startup companies that can afford to use and do use recruiters, are tech companies.  And as is pretty clear by the title of my blog, we don’t do tech here.  😉

All of our client companies are well established with long histories of solid growth.  If they don’t fit that pattern then it is unlikely that they can or will pay for our services.  That also means that they have been hiring people (both with and without the use of a recruiter) for many years.  Most if not all use some for of structured interviewing techniques.  Some even print out structured interview guides for the interviewers.  So by and large, we don’t have a problem with consistency in our niche. 

Sometimes, however, we have a problem with rigidity.  Sometimes we have companies that can’t see the value in a candidate that my be a little bit outside of the mold.  Their standards for hiring have become so rigid, that they may be unwilling to give an excellent performer a chance in their organization, just because he hasn’t been in charge of the minimum number of units with the exact footprint and volume that they have as a criteria.  So… sometimes consistency may not be so good – if it turns to rigidity and resistance.

-author: Carl Chapman. Carl is the founder of CEC Search – Executive Restaurant Recruiters. He has 20+ years of restaurant industry experience, spent 5 awarding winning years as an executive recruiter with a top 25 MRI franchise office. Carl graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1980.