A few years ago, we were interviewing a candidate who was exactly what we were looking for. Strong background, right mindset, clearly capable of doing the job and then some. The only problem was that we weren’t the only ones who had noticed. They were in conversations with several other organizations at the same time, which meant that everything I thought I knew about how an interview worked got flipped on its head pretty quickly. We weren’t just evaluating them. They were evaluating us.
You’re Being Evaluated Too
That experience stayed with me, and it came back when I heard Horst Schulze, founder of Ritz-Carlton, speak at John Maxwell’s masterclass. He talked about the idea that great organizations don’t offer people a position, they extend an invitation to join something worth being part of. He called it inviting someone to join “our beautiful dream.” That’s exactly right, but there’s a second half to that idea that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. While we’re deciding whether a candidate is the right fit, they are deciding whether we are right for them. We just don’t always act like it.
In our industry, and really in any service-driven business, the pressure to fill an open role fast is real. Someone gives two weeks’ notice, and suddenly the calendar feels like a countdown clock. There’s this fear that things will break, that the team will buckle, that clients will feel the gap. So we move quickly, we interview fast, we make offers fast, and we rationalize it because the alternative feels scarier. But a bad hire doesn’t solve the problem of an empty seat. It trades one problem for a more expensive one. Most leaders reading this have learned that lesson at least once, and it’s not a cheap one.
Sell the Dream, Not Just the Job
The stronger move, even when it’s uncomfortable, is to stay in the process and use that time to sell your organization with the same seriousness you bring to evaluating the candidate. Strong people, the ones you actually want, are almost never sitting around waiting for an offer. They’re usually not looking at all. Which means your first job is to give them a reason to look, and then a reason to choose you over the other organizations also trying to make their case.
What Horst was really describing when he talked about joining a dream is a pitch. Everybody is selling something, and if you’re a leader trying to bring the right person into your organization, you’re selling your culture, your vision, your growth path, and the community your team has built. Benefits matter, but they’re not the deciding factor for the people you most want to hire. What they want to know is whether there’s somewhere to grow, whether the culture matches what they’ve heard about you, and whether the work will actually mean something.
At ITBD, we’ve built a serious selection process around this thinking. We use a refined version of top grading, which is a structured approach to evaluating candidates not just on skills but on trajectory and character, and we’re proactive about reaching out to strong candidates directly, because waiting on applications means competing on the same terms as everyone else. We’d rather find the person we want and make the case for why this is the right place for them.
The case we make is real. Our HAPPY core values, humble, accountable, positive, passionate, and your community, aren’t a poster on the wall. They show up in things like our Life by Design series, our Women of ITBD program, our weekly AI innovation calls, and the way we bring people into something larger than a job description from their very first week. That’s what we’re inviting people into. That’s the dream we’re asking them to choose.
The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong
We take the selection process seriously because we’ve seen what happens when shortcuts get made. One wrong hire in the wrong role doesn’t just create a performance problem. It affects the people around them and the culture you’ve worked hard to build. In the IT world, we say it plainly: one virus can spread fast. The same is true of the wrong person in the wrong seat.
So, before your next interview, the question worth sitting with isn’t only whether they’re right for you, it’s whether you’re giving them a real reason to choose you.
