Stop hiring perfect talent. Start hiring trainable talent

Imagine this scenario: A recruiting team has screened over 200 resumes received from a job posting. After scrutinising these resumes, they call 25 candidates for the interview round. And select none! Why? Because none of them had all the qualifications listed in the job description.

This scenario plays out across organisations worldwide, and it reveals a fundamental misalignment in the modern hiring strategy: the pursuit of perfection over potential. For HR leaders, this obsession with the "perfect candidate" has become a major issue. It's driving up costs, consuming time, limiting the talent pool, and most critically, causing them to miss candidates with potential who could become your organisation's greatest assets in the future. 

The Perfect Candidate Paradox

The perfect candidate is a myth. Yet, most hiring processes are built around finding them. They ask for candidates who have done this exact job, in this exact industry, with these exact technologies, under these exact conditions. Such candidates, if they exist in the first place, are extremely difficult to find. And on the off-chance you do find them, they are very expensive. So how does this perfect candidate fallacy manifest itself?

• Inflated job descriptions: Open a job portal, and you’ll find wish lists that are disguised as job descriptions. For instance, does a role of junior marketing associate requires 10-year prior experience? Or a software programmer who needs to know all the programming languages ever invented?.
• The screening shortcut: Because perfect candidates are impossible, hiring managers screen resumes by checking boxes rather than assessing potential. Someone without the exact keyword gets rejected automatically, even if they have the underlying capability and potential to learn.

The result? Hiring teams reject candidates with exceptional foundations, intelligence, adaptability, work ethic, and cultural fit, simply because they lack specific experience. 

The Hidden Cost of Chasing Perfection

The pursuit of perfect candidates carries enormous, often invisible costs for an organisation.

• Extended time-to-hire and opportunity cost: The longer a role remains vacant, the greater the damage it causes to the organisation. Existing employees must multitask and work overtime to cover this gap. These causes delay in project completion, and organisations end up losing crucial revenue.  Studies have also shown that for every month a role remains unfilled, organisations lose roughly 15-30% of that position's productive output.
• Increased Hiring Costs: Perfect candidates command premium salaries. And there is intense competition among the companies to hire talent from this small pool, driving the salaries up through the roof. 
• Higher turnover and engagement issues: Many of these ‘perfect candidates’ that the organisations spend a fortune on hiring are actually overqualified for the role they have been hired for. These candidates get bored quickly if they feel the work is not challenging enough for them, and eventually leave. Organisations chasing perfect experience often see first-year turnover rates of 25-40%, wiping out the investment and restarting the cycle.

A case for hiring trainable talent

Trainable talent helps redirect a recruiting team’s hiring criteria to more cost-effective, sustainable, and engaged employees.

• Intellectual horsepower: Talented individuals with potential have the ability to understand complex concepts, learn new frameworks, and apply knowledge in new contexts. This is intelligence and adaptability that HR teams can assess through problem-solving questions, case discussions, and how candidates explain their thinking.
• Hunger and drive: Such talents have a genuine desire to grow, learn, and contribute. This shows up when they talk about their career trajectory, what excites them about this role, and how they respond to challenge. Someone eager to develop often outpaces someone comfortable in their expertise.
• Coachability: They are willing to receive feedback, learn from mistakes, and adjust their process to get better outputs. This can be observed in the way they handle constructive criticism, how they recover from failures, and their attitude toward development.
• Foundational knowledge: Candidates who have their basics clear can learn about any new tool or technology at a quicker pace than those who mastered one tool but have weak basics. 
• Self-awareness: Candidates who understand their strengths and areas of improvement are easier to develop than those who don't. They're less defensive about feedback and more strategic about growth.

How should HR teams redesign their strategy to hire candidates with potential?

Changing the recruiting team’s hiring criteria involves working with leadership and hiring managers to understand their requirements for a particular role. Based on their inputs, redesign the hiring process to include candidates with potential as well. 

• Redesign the interview process:  Rather than asking the potential candidates about a specific software or process, ask questions that judge their cognitive skills, like learning ability, problem-solving and adaptability. 
• Implement structured assessment: Use assessments to evaluate cognitive ability, learning potential, and cultural fit. These are better predictors of success than resume screening and reduce bias in the hiring process.
• Rebuild Onboarding and Development Infrastructure: Strong onboarding, clear learning pathways, mentorship programs, and skill development investments are essential in developing talent with potential. 
• Educate Hiring Managers: Conduct workshops with hiring managers on unconscious bias, what actually predicts job success, and how to assess the potential of a candidate. Provide them with examples of trainable hires who succeeded in the organisation.
• Track Long-Term Outcomes: Monitor whether trainable hires outperform or underperform compared to traditionally hired candidates. Measure retention, performance, promotion rates, and engagement. Use this data to refine your approach over time.

Conclusion: The perfect candidate is not the best  candidate

A candidate who looks perfect on paper may not be the best long-term hire. They may lack hunger, they may be resistant to your way of doing things, they may cost more than they're worth, or they may leave in two years because the role wasn’t challenging enough for them. 

The best candidates are the ones who had to work harder to get where they are. The ones who are grateful for the opportunity, who are eager to learn and grow, and whose values align with the organisation, even though their resume looks different from what the job description mentions.

For HR leaders, the shift from hiring perfect to hiring trainable is redirected toward what actually matters: intelligence, character, cultural fit, and potential.