Find the best solution

- Something that often gets forgotten is that choosing between options isn't always the answer. What if none of the options is really good enough? An example of this would be recruiting a person. What if the best candidate is okay? In fact, quite good, but not excitingly brilliant. A friend of mine calls these people the 40 percenters. Not bad enough to fire, but not really good enough either. Should we give them the job? If we really need someone is quite good. Good enough for your organization. If you decide no, then you have to go through all the time and cost of recruiting all over again just to get someone a bit better. But maybe you should. So, how do we decide if a possible solution is good enough? Well, if you're going to be scientific about it, then you would have criteria. And these would be the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. And if the solution that you are considering is missing even one of the must-haves then it's not good enough and the search must start again. If your candidate must have a degree in export shipping, then however good they are on everything else, if they don't have that, then they're out. If my vehicle must be safe, then however exciting or cool it is, if it's not safe, then I'm not going to buy it. If a possible solution has all of the must-haves, you can then look at the weighted totals of all the want-to-haves and see who or what has the best combination of those. And of course, even if one of your candidates has all of the must-haves, they might still not be good enough because they have very few of the additional nice-to-haves. And this is something that you have to decide ideally before your interviewing process. What's good enough? What will we settle for? If there are only one or two must-haves, then having them alone isn't enough. It's all about the other factors. But if there are quite a lot of must-haves, then maybe anyone we can find who has got them would be fine for the job. The want-to-haves are just a way to choose which person in the event of a tie. But what if the person or the solution to our problem has the must-haves but very little of the want-to-haves? They fulfill the minimum, but they aren't exciting. If you were very scientific, I guess you could work out the cost of going back to the recruiting process again and compare that with the cost of living with someone who's only 80% good enough or 40%. But in reality, I don't think it's possible to measure these numbers. So in the end, it's your logical list of factors plus a gut feel choice. So, what are your must have factors? And what are the nice-to-haves? And what's the minimum that you would accept for a person or a solution that had all the must-haves but didn't have very many of the nice-to-haves?