When I joined the recruiting industry, the tech boom was in its heyday, and like most other companies, Microsoft’s recruiting philosophy – no matter if they were interviewing a college senior or a senior professional – was “hire on potential.”  As a recruiter, I was trained to interview against qualities such as a candidate’s ability to learn new technologies or deal with ambiguous situations.  As a hiring gatekeeper, it was my job to ensure that the interviewers during final rounds focused their evaluations on similar traits which would indicate a candidate’s ability to live up to their full potential.  In fact, the “Your potential. Our passion” campaign that promoted the company’s mission (“to help people reach their potential”) originated from that corporate hiring philosophy.  “Potential” and “hiring” were married concepts.

Microsoft was not alone.  While the company prided itself on and promoted this philosophy the loudest, “hiring on potential” was the name of the technical recruiting game in those days.

And we all know the rest of the story.  The bubble burst.  Hiring became tight.  Most companies couldn’t hire at all, and those who did couldn’t hire much.  Or had been burned by poor hires with promises of so-called “potential.”

And what resulted you’ve heard me talk about again and again.  Even though a lot of companies still talk about hiring on potential (and still incorporate this practice in their interview evaluations), many have already traveled very far down the path of hiring on past experience or previously developed skills.  I'm all for a healthy balance, but why is this new way of hiring dangerous?   It creates extremely narrow pools on both sides of the equation and further perpetuates the myth that software engineering is a sucky career with sucky prospects.

While software engineering is still a hot career, the talent a lot of employers seek is not always what’s available in the market.  (Supply does not equal demand; expectations are too narrow; many companies competing for the same small pool of talent.)  And the jobs a lot of engineers seek aren’t necessarily in their ability to land.  (Again, supply does not equal demand; expectations may be too high; many engineers competing for the same small pool of “awesome” jobs.)  Zoe and I call this space “the gap,” and it’s not nearly as cool as the store. And really, who wants to live in the gap?   

I got to thinking about this idea of potential again because of this post by MiniMicrosoft in which he talks specifically about what Microsoft could do to get back to those days of hiring on potential … maybe in a safer way this time around.  He says the industry is not in a “talent glut;” it’s in a “talent crisis,” and I totally agree.  The landscape has changed, but the talent and jobs are still there.  Whether you are an employer or jobseeker, you just have to think about it a bit different. It's not a Microsoft problem; it's an industry problem.

Anyway, back to the question I posed in the title …Do companies really still hire on potential?  And if so, how is the “new potential” different from the “old potential”?

gretchen