You know what is the sign of a toxic culture? Gatekeeping when hiring.
Hiring is about finding out if someone can do the job. If someone has 80% of the skills to do the job, they can clearly do the job. However what I have noticed is that many hiring managers want you to know everything and if you don’t know everything, then you aren’t good enough.
Now this isn’t a complaint about me not being hired for some jobs. I do fine in the marketplace. Rather this is about why a person would not want to hire someone who clearly knows the majority of something, but just not a specific thing that may be niche.
What I think it is that hiring managers want to feel that they are so smart, that only someone who knows everything they know can help their company. The truth is that anyone who is smart can learn and when your resume shows that you learn in each position, its clear you can do the job.
Now hiring managers might respond to this by saying why shouldn’t we get the person who knows the most? Isn’t that the best person for the job? Not really. Just because someone knows something doesn’t mean that they are a critical thinker. It doesn’t mean that they will act on what they know. It doesn’t mean that they are passionate about their job. It doesn’t mean that they will be effective on the job. It just means that they know something.
Actually having and using that skill and knowledge is where hiring managers need to focus. I love the focus on skills based job interviews. Demonstrate the skill or give us the environment where the job needs to be done and let us do something. Verbal games don’t help anyone, and it is clear that knowing isn’t enough. If that was the case then anyone could do IT and they can’t. It takes more than knowledge to be a successful IT person but its hard to quantify that isn’t it?