Every year at Novotus, we fill thousands of positions at all functional levels and in just about every industry you can imagine.

We have dozens of brilliant recruiting professionals, researchers, marketing and administrative experts all pointed at three tasks.
1. Fill every job
2. Delight our customers (both the hiring manager and all candidates)
3. Encourage and elevate the team around them

As you might imagine, we love numbers and study them like a good sommelier studies a good wine. The one number we focus on with intense focus is Searches OVER 60 Days Old. It’s an important number. At this point in the search, we typically have a pretty animated hiring team, the recruiter is getting close to frustrated and our HR partners are looking to us for answers as well.

After years in this business, it finally occurred to me that maybe we should just provide our clients some options. Now – these are obvious, but they seem to escape everyone involved almost all of the time. It’s important to cover these because they amazingly seem to put everyone back on the same team again. It is human nature to look for someone at fault when things are getting bad, but its good business leadership to pull the team together and get them working towards a solution.

So, the next time you are upside down in a search and things are heating up, I have found that it is amazingly helpful to share these 4 options with the entire team.
1. You can change the job specs and keep searching
2. You can NOT change the job specs and keep searching
3. You can HIRE someone you have interviewed
4. You can GIVE UP

That’s it… That’s all there is… If the decision is to not hire one of the people in the loop, you can either quit or keep looking. Deciding is power. Things get bad when the team has no plan and when there is a lack of fruitful dialog. The metrics seem to always point to the right decision when aligned with the business goals.

Recruiting is about choosing first and executing next. The next time you are having trouble closing out a tough search, pull the team together and tell them about the 4 choices and watch things start to happen.

Oh, by the way, every team seems to have one of those super smart people that loves coming up with another option. There actually is a 5th option… FIRE THE RECRUITER and/or ADD MORE RECRUITERS. Here is the problem. The recruiting team you have on the search, by this time, not only know this search and your team very well, they also know what they have done to date. A huge percentage of the work another recruiter might do as the “On Deck” player will duplicate work already done. Adding additional recruiters in an uncoordinated fashion will just confuse the market and the work/communication flow.

So – Stick with your team whenever possible or you will likely just extend an already long search.

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Mike Mayeux is the Founder and CEO of Novotus.