by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting
Success stories are often characterized by a long string of failures.
You probably know that Steve Jobs failed many times (Apple I, Apple II, the Lisa, the Newton, and NeXT hardware) before experiencing some of his biggest successes.
However, did you know that Google has more failures than any modern company?
Perhaps you don’t remember Froogle, Google Reader, Google Web Accelerator, Google Answers, Google Video Player, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google X, Google+, and Google Talk.
These are products Google tried and later abandoned. They were all failures.
Another Google product called AdSense could have been added to this list as well—it started in a similar way inside Google. However, it now produces $10 billion/year in revenue for Google.
Yesterday, we discussed how this principle applies to interviews. But, it doesn’t end there.
In order to become a high-performing recruiting organization, you must constantly try new things and fail frequently in all areas of your recruiting process.
This includes recruitment marketing, organic sourcing, recruiting scripts, contact frequency, post-interview follow-up techniques, nurturing tactics, and the myriad of other tasks that make up the recruiting process.
Learning from others and sharing best practices can help you short-cut this progression, but there’s no substitute for remaining curious and testing things on your own.