There are many reasons for The Great Candidate Shortage (which is not a thing, btw), a few of which are out of your control, but many of which you can resolve by better recruitment, starting from the right first principles.

This post is about defining what a good candidate looks like when putting together your job description.

It’s a simple enough concept – understanding the attitudes and behaviours, together with the hard minimum skills, qualifications and industry tools & processes required to fulfil a role and building it from there.

Of course, that requires fully understanding what your role entails, how it fits in with the business, what the context is, where the gaps are, culture fit or better yet culture add.

The more straightforward a role, the easier this is to establish. The worse your understanding of your own role and situation, the harder it is to establish what good actually is.

A weak understanding of your requirement and “good” is one reason you defer to “wrong industry experience”, “wrong culture fit”, “overqualified” or the other generic standard reasons that have no substantive meaning.

Worse still are the “too old”, “bad attitude” type internal excuses that cover up bias, and get explained away by any of the three points above.

Once you drill down into the specific detail of what good actually is, these excuses become irrelevant, because you can say exactly what rules a candidate out from assessing them truly and fairly.

And when you can do that, you may find that what appeared to be reasons to rule people out, on the basis of poorly understood risk, become reasons to rule them in because you have clearer criteria to recruit against.

"We don't want anyone too old" can actually mean you need someone on a career trajectory who can grow with a role, or someone looking to challenge the status quo rather than work in maintenance mode.

Those are both valid reasons to decline a candidate that has nothing to do with age, yet get lumbered with it because of the wrong assumptions of what “good” looks like.

The same goes for any assumption, discriminatory or otherwise.

Try asking Why? of your assumptions until you get to the root cause, which will allow you to define good. There’s a reason why 5Y is an effective problem-solving tool, and it can be applied in recruitment.

Establishing “good” is a foundation for an effective and fair recruitment process that may just show that your candidate shortage was only an internal problem after all.

Only when you’ve done this, together with all the other basic practices that optimise how you recruit, do you get to blame the market.