Even a Blind Pig can find an acorn once in a while.

By Philip Sawyer

If you’re having a tough time finding something, remember that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while. This encouraging idiom actually comes from ancient Rome, where the concept of a blind animal turning something up lent itself to the Latin saying that a blind dove sometimes finds a pea. An 18th-century Friedrich Schiller play employed the blind-pig-and-acorn version, and the play’s translation into English and French may have brought it into modern English speech. (I found this posted on www.waywordradio.org).

I originally heard this quote from an Agricultural Economics major while I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri.  MU had a great College of Agriculture and, as one might expect, attracted a multitude of rather colorful characters that had been raised on the farm.  Some of them were fond of using some very insightful idioms and metaphors that frequently featured farm animals.    

This particular idiom has served me well over the years as an IT Recruiter.   When a Recruiter begins a search for a candidate without a good understanding of the position, the hiring process and the client decision making process, they are the “blind pig”.   If you send enough candidates to the hiring manager, eventually you will find the “acorn” or “new employee”.    To my way of thinking, this approach is very time consuming for the hiring team.   It is much more efficient to invest the appropriate amount of time on the front end with a knowledgeable and experienced recruiter and to communicate your feedback on each candidate so that the recruiter can focus only on those candidates that have a high probability of getting hired.   The recruitment process is not static; there is usually some sort of evolution on the part of the hiring team as they move through the process.   Some of this evolution is a result of what happens day to day in the work environment, and some of it is the result of the interview process itself.  

The benefit to the hiring team in using a “sighted pig” or informed recruiter is obvious.   You spend less time reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates.   The net gain in efficiency in the hiring process is huge.  True, the hiring team spends more time on the front end defining the requirements and time through the process keeping the recruiter informed.   However, if you contrast the time investment of a 10 minute phone call with the time and effort put into even the shortest of interviews, it is clear that the hiring team comes out the big winners.

Despite that, in recent years many companies have implemented hiring procedures that operate on the “blind pig” theory of recruiting and intentionally blind perfectly good pigs.    They publish a job order to a number of vendors, restrict all interaction with the hiring team related to the job or the candidates and encourage the recruiters to submit the first available candidate rapidly.   Typically, no feedback is provided to the recruiters about their candidates, until one day, some weeks or months later, the job is closed.    This process encourages speed over quality, and since no one will ever know why a candidate was not interviewed, or if interviewed not selected, the recruiter never really gets to understand the hiring team’s needs or preferences. They only know whether they hit or missed; whether they have or have not found that acorn in the dark.

As a result, we have this cycle of continuing to submit the same old candidates, because they are available.  (I should point out being immediately available is not necessarily a positive sign that you have a great candidate.)  The recruiters continue to make the same mistakes because they don’t have a clue about how the hiring team makes their decisions, nor are they able to improve their recruiting process without useful feedback.  Additionally, they are not able to educate the hiring team on the market or interact with them on specific candidates.    Over the years I have helped many hiring managers get more information that helped them over the hump in making a decision on particular candidates.   Sometimes I can help the manager overcome their concerns; other times, the information I find leads to a decision not to hire. Either way, both I and the hiring manager walk away with a better understanding of our respective needs in the hiring process.

Fortunately, there are still companies that see the value in a trusted working relationship.  My best clients let me sit in on the interviews and solicit my frank evaluations as a part of their hiring team.  I find I learn more about the job and team by observing the interview than I will ever learn from a job description.   This enables the recruiter to be part of the hiring process and to bring real value to the client.   If I acted like a blind pig with these clients I would never be able to keep them happy.