Welcome to Manager Tools. Today we're going to talk about what to do when a manager has two candidates for a job that meet the standard, but you can only offer one candidate.

And if you think you can dismiss this cast because it's being released during a downturn, well, think again. Slowdowns are the times

we are most likely to see multiple good candidates due to more job seekers. Here we go. Oh, This is an interesting topic today because I've run into this problem many, many times.

And to be honest, and the problem being that I had interviewed

a bunch of people and I'd come down to two or three candidates. They're all really really good.

I would have been happy with any of them.

Right. Yet I had a preference for one of them.

I didn't want to be in the position where I offered to one. She declined and I had already

declined to the other two candidates.

Oh that's, yeah, that's, well, that's pretty common. I mean, in fact, most managers, they focus on the first person.

And it's a function of mindset, you're looking for the best person.

And, you know, they tend to recruit, they do two mistakes, they make two mistakes, one, they recruit to find someone good enough rather than finding the best person they can.

And the other thing that they do is they look for the back. rather than finding the best person they can.

And the other thing that they do is they look for the best person

without realizing they ought to be comparing to a standard

and there might be a couple people that meet the standard.

And recruiting to find somebody good enough, which I call a corollary to the warm body principle,

it's a pretty critical distinction in recruiting.

To your point, right? You're thrilled about it, but at the same time you were unprepared for it.

Right, exactly.

Okay, what do I do, right?

And this is kind of, it's essentially a version of the horseman Christmas rule, which is things that we do rarely but that are important

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