Earlier this week, my wife was explaining the process she uses to buy and ripen avocados for our family.  

My wife finds a perfectly ripened avocado to be one of the best ways to start her day.

This reminded me of  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 recruiting advantage goes to those who plan ahead and build a bench of talented individuals who ripen when the time’s right.

They alone will enjoy the fruits of hiring high-performers.