What do you do to make the Hiring Manager realize that you have looked under every rock but have still not come up with their ideal, perfect candidate? You bring them 'compromise candidates' and talk directly to the Hiring Manager about what you have found and what potential candidates have told you. Tell them what the candidates themselves have told you about the opportunity. Of course, in order to do this, you have to call those "less than perfect" compromise candidates and pitch the position to them.

All too often, we as recruiters take our Hiring Managers very literally. We write down every single they say and then go out and try to find the perfect candidate on the job boards, on social networking sites, in our database. We don't make any calls to the 'compromise candidates' because we are looking for the perfect candidate. We spend endless hours sourcing on line, looking for the exact combination of skills at exactly the right price. When we can't find that combination, we spend more time complaining about how unreasonable the Hiring Manager is. We gripe that they expect us to just keep searching when we "know" that these people don't exist at this price. Or, we figure that if we just learn more cool new searching techniques we will eventually find the perfect candidate.

Instead, we should talk to the Hiring Manager - continually! Don't just go off, do your sourcing and pitch candidates over the wall. Early in the process, show them some people with all the skills, but that require a higher salary than the Hiring Manager had hoped. Then show them some people in their price range that don't have every single skill. You will be amazed how flexible Hiring Managers will be when they are presented with real data and choices.