The first step toward achieving quality of hire is effectively sourcing the candidates from which to choose. But before discussing this crucial foundation, we’ll briefly examine the concept of  “quality”.  Wikipedia affirms: “In business, engineering and manufacturing “quality” has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute … .” 

But when it comes to hiring, quality is not subjective—at least to the extent that it is inexorably tied both to circumstance and relativity.  Hiring managers face a finite number of candidates and must judge the relative quality of each one, both against all the others and against a specific set of highly rational hiring criteria for any given job. Also paramount to every successful hire is the equally rational practical constraint that you need to fill the vacancy within a designated period of time.  Indeed, the very tangible risks of a new hire are more than offset by the risk of not filling the position in a timely enough manner.

Thus it’s critical that throughout the hiring process you keep things moving along promptly.  And one important expedient is to make an efficient choice among the numerous options for sourcing candidates.  However, we caution you strongly against deploying too many of these options simultaneously, since for most people having tentacles going in multiple directions at once is too time-consuming.  It’s also too confusing, since most sourcing options entail a different selection strategy, as detailed in the following list.  It outlines many of the options available along with the pros and cons of each.