Last weekend, my wife asked me to stop by the grocery store and pick up a couple of avocados for a dinner she was hosting.
Her parting instructions right before we hung up the phone: Make sure they’re ripe!
That’s not as easy as it sounds, and it later sparked a conversation about one of my favorite Seth Godin posts.
Here’s Seth’s advice about avocados (and recruiting):
If you wait until you really want an avocado, the market won’t have any ripe ones. You need to buy them in advance.
If you eat an avocado that’s not quite ripe, you won’t enjoy it. AND, you won’t have a chance to enjoy it tomorrow, when it would have been perfect if you had only waited.
If you live your life based on instant gratification and little planning, you’ll either never have a good avocado, or you’ll pay more than you should to someone else who planned ahead.
Buy more avocados than you think you need, because the hassles are always greater than the cost, so you might as well invest.
And since you have so many, share them when they’re ripe. What goes around comes around.
It only makes sense to think of recruiting in these terms.
The advantage goes to those who plan ahead and build a bench of talented individuals.
They alone will enjoy the fruits of hiring high performers.
