A candidate going through your hiring process interviewed well. She’s run exactly the kind of program you’re hiring for, she clearly gets the business, and by the end of the process half the panel was already imagining her on the team. There’s one problem. Your role lives in Workday, and she has spent her entire career in SAP.

So your hiring manager hesitates. “I just wish she had the right systems experience.”

You pass. And six weeks later, the req is still open and now you’re seriously considering someone who has the right software and almost none of the other stuff.

We do this constantly. We trade the 80% who can think for the 100% who fit the checklist, and then we act surprised when the checklist hire turns out to be the worse bet.

The unicorn doesn’t exist, and waiting for it has a price tag

Here’s the problem: most of your “must-haves” aren’t. They’re nice-to-haves wearing a costume.

We’ve all written the job description that secretly requires a 12-year-old with 15 years of experience. We list eleven requirements when the role genuinely demands four. And every item on that inflated list shrinks your pool.  You’re not eliminating unqualified people, but all of the qualified people with one gap.

Here’s the part that is bothersome. While you hold out for the perfect match, the work isn’t getting done. Your team is covering the gap. Your time-to-fill is climbing. Research on this is consistent across the industry: the longer a req stays open, the more it costs you in productivity, in team morale, and in the quality of the candidate you’ll eventually settle for out of pure exhaustion.

A 100% match who starts in March is often worth less than an 80% match who starts in January and is fully assimilated by April. We rarely do that math.

Stop treating the gap as a reason to reject. Start treating it as something to offer.

What if the 20% gap isn’t a disqualifier — it’s a lever?

Training as a benefit means you build the skill development into the offer itself.  Not a performance-improvement plan you ambush someone with in month three. Not a vague “we support growth here” line on the careers site. A named, funded, scheduled commitment that you put on the table the moment you extend the offer.

“We’re excited to bring you on. In your first 90 days, we’ll fund your certification in [the tool you’re missing], and you’ll have dedicated ramp up time to get there.”

Two things happen when you say that. First, you’ve just expanded your viable pool to include every candidate who is one skill away (which, in most searches, is a lot of people). Second, you’ve handed your top choice a reason to say yes that your competitors probably aren’t offering. Candidates aren’t just evaluating the role. They’re evaluating who’s investing in them.

What this looks like in practice

The shift isn’t philosophical. It’s tactical:

Instead of screening out a strong analyst because she doesn’t know Tableau, ask whether she can already reason with data in Excel and SQL because, if she can, the BI tool gap is a two-week problem, not a dealbreaker.

Instead of listing “5+ years with our exact tech stack” as a hard filter, ask your hiring manager which skills are genuinely unteachable on the job and which are just faster if someone already has them. Protect the first list. Negotiate the second.

Instead of burying “growth opportunities” in a generic perks section, ask what specific, fundable training you can name in the offer itself — a certification, a bootcamp, a structured mentorship, a defined plan with hours actually carved out.

Instead of treating ramp up time as lost productivity, ask your finance partner to model it as an onboarding investment because that’s exactly what it is, and it makes the 80% hire far easier to approve.

You’re not lowering the bar. You’re moving it to the things that actually can’t be taught like judgment, ownership, and how someone thinks, then being honest that the rest is learnable.

“But what if we train them and they leave?”

This objection kills more of these hires than any other and it drives me crazy.  I’ve had hiring managers whose average tenure on their teams is less than two years and they won’t make a hire until they’re convinced the person will stay five.

So let me offer you this old exchange: A CFO asks, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave?” The CEO answers, “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

But there’s a better answer than that. The data points the other way entirely. People who feel an employer bet on them, who were brought in and developed, tend to stay longer, not shorter. The upskilling offer isn’t a retention risk. Handled well, it’s a retention strategy disguised as a recruiting tactic. You don’t just close the candidate. You close them with a reason to be loyal.

This is literally the entire premise of early talent

If the upskilling offer sounds familiar to anyone in campus recruiting, it should. It’s the whole model.

Every new grad is, by definition, an 80% candidate. They have the foundation (the way of thinking, the raw capability, the hunger, etc.) and a predictable set of gaps around tools, process, and context. Nobody looks at a graduating senior and rejects them for “lacking five years of experience with our platform.” We hire for trajectory and we build the rest. That’s the bet.

So here’s my question for everyone who runs experienced-hire searches: if that logic is obviously correct for a 22-year-old, why do we abandon it the moment a candidate turns 30?

The skills-based mindset early talent teams have used for years isn’t a junior-hiring trick. It’s a sourcing strategy your whole org is leaving on the table. The 80% candidate is everywhere, at every level. The teams that learn to close them will out-hire the teams still waiting for a unicorn to walk through the door.

Your move

Look at your last three closed reqs and your two oldest open ones. How many strong “not quites” did you pass on for a single missing skill? And how many of those gaps could you have closed faster than the search itself took?

If the honest answer makes you wince a little, take a chance on the 80% candidate and let me know how it works out.

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At ES Talent Solutions, this is exactly what we help teams untangle — separating the requirements that actually matter from the ones inflating your time-to-fill, and building offers that turn “close, but not quite” into “started Monday.” If your requisitions are sitting open while qualified people walk away over one teachable skill, let’s talk.

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