SelectOne Blog

It’s incredibly demoralizing to go through the job search process, including writing a job description, researching the best places to post the description, responding to candidate applications, and interviewing potential new hires, only to lose your top candidates to competitors.

Job candidates are familiar with the flutter in their stomach, the nervousness, the anxiety. They polish the answers to anticipated interview questions and they review their previous job experiences to figure out what will make them stand out. New clothes, nice accessories, maybe a manicure or a haircut before the interview— these are some of the ways that candidates prepare for interviews.

In the field of recruiting, we have a term for someone who isn’t currently looking for a job, but is the ideal match for an open position at another place of employment. These people are called “passive candidates.” Before we can talk about how to recruit them, we should first talk about why some companies need to recruit passive candidates in the first place.

In some ways, it’s a dream scenario: having multiple highly qualified candidates who are both applying for a job within your company. During a candidate-driven marketplace, when there tend to be more positions open than there are people to fill them, this situation becomes less common, and so you may have less practice over the past few years with making the hard decision between two great candidates.

Every moment a sales job is open at your company, you’re losing money. Salespeople serve the essential role of generating revenue and maintaining important customer relationships. A missing salesperson means missed opportunities.

Sales teams can often feel like their own little island, with a culture unique to themselves. This can be quite a positive thing at times; after all, it doesn’t make sense to have a sales team that functions in the same way as a team of accountants or maintenance technicians.

Hiring is never exactly a walk in the park, but hiring salespeople is strangely nerve-wracking to many. For many roles, it’s a simple matter to screen out unqualified candidates. Can they work out a coding problem on a whiteboard? Can they proofread a memo for grammatical errors? Can they prep vegetables in the allotted time without violating any health code standards? Then they can probably do the job well enough. The rest comes down to values, personality, and culture fit.

If you need to know one thing about hiring a chief information officer (CIO), this is it: Demand currently outpaces supply. In the U.S., there are currently more open CIO jobs than talented CIOs to fill them, so hiring one can get rather cutthroat.

The CTO, or chief technology officer, is an unusual role. In many companies, there is no need for a CTO. While there is always a certain degree of technology involved in any business (even a sole proprietor needs to use software or mechanical equipment at some point), the role of technology in the business is often handled by the COO or even the CEO, as it’s not close enough to the core of the business to warrant adding another C-level executive to the team.

The role of COO is a unique one. On one hand, they tackle the everyday operational side of the business that the CEO can’t. On the other hand, it’s often a title used in succession planning, grooming the individual in question to take on the CEO role one day. So it’s both explicitly tied to the CEO … and explicitly separate. No wonder hiring a COO can be confusing.