Challenge Your Beliefs Around Hiring: Don’t Discount Job Candidates Based on Location

You’ve seen this time and time again—Employers don’t want to hire job candidates who don’t live in their local area.

The reasons for this, however, aren’t very clear to me.

Many companies will give one (or more) of the following excuses for why they only hire local candidates:

• The company doesn’t want to pay for a candidate’s moving expenses if the person doesn’t live locally.
• The employee needs to be in the office to get work done, therefore a non-local candidate doesn’t fit the bill.
• If it doesn’t work out, a local employee wouldn’t have uprooted his/her life to come work for the company.

These excuses seem pretty preposterous to me, thou.

I can’t understand a company not focusing its search on finding the best candidate for the job, regardless of where the person lives.

With all the technology and workplace flexibility that exists today, it makes no sense to only search for job candidates in your local area.

I mean, what are the chances that the right person for the job lives within a few miles of your company? My guess is, not very likely.

If you only select from candidates who live in your local area, you’ll get a good candidate, but probably not the best one for the job.

But by searching for candidates located anywhere, you give yourself a bigger pool of talent to choose from and, therefore, a better shot at actually finding the right person.

A Real-Life Example
When I co-founded Fat Frog Publishing back in May 2009, my business partner and I had two goals in mind:

• Introduce brilliant-yet-unknown writers to the world, and
• Run a successful publishing house from the comfort of our own homes (as I live in Houston and she lives in Georgia).

Never once did we think this company couldn’t work because we didn’t live in the same place.

And the people we’ve employed to work for us don’t live near us either—One of our graphic designers lives in Southern California, one of our editors lives in Indiana and we publish through an online distributor whose offices are in Tennessee.

Yet despite all the distance between us and our employees, we still manage to run a successful start-up. We already have two books in the queue to be published, and two more going through the editing process in order to be published late next year.

When my partner and I were looking to hire someone to design our book covers, we wanted the best designer we could find—someone who fit our vision and who was also up-and-coming like we are.

And to find this person, we didn’t go down the street and start asking for resumes. We went online and asked for any interested person to submit their resume and portfolio links. Then we chose two designers who we thought fit our vision and hired them.

Now this is just one example. I can name many, many companies who use an entirely remote workforce (Treehugger.com being one of them) and are very successful.

The reason for this is because these companies have branched out and decided that they wanted to hire the best people for the jobs, even if those people lived thousands of miles away.

After all, why have convenience options like the Internet, e-mail and BlackBerries if you aren’t going to use them to their full potential?

Hiring Non-Local Candidate
To begin hiring non-local candidates to work at your company, you’ll first need to revisit your beliefs surrounding your hiring practices. Because before you can make any changes, you need to determine what it is you believe and why.

The next step would be to slowly begin making changes by implementing new hiring practices into your company.

So maybe you start by hiring one remote employee. Maybe you start by recruiting job candidates from another city in your state. Maybe you start by putting together an employee relocation budget.

Or maybe you just start by letting the idea that local candidates aren’t always the best people for the job seep into your company’s mindset.

Challenging—and changing—your beliefs about hiring won’t happen overnight. But if you keep learning and keep looking for a better way of doing things, you’ll get there. Slowly, but surely.

For more on challenging beliefs at your company, read the following HRTools.com Insights:

• An Employee’s Belief System Has an Impact on His/Her Work, by Eric Jones
• How to Utilize the Affect a Belief System Has to Your Advantage, by Eric Jones
• Challenge Your Employees’ Belief Systems, by Eric Jones

When it comes to hiring, don't expect the best person for the job to always be a local candidate. Many times, that's not the case.