Great organizations are filled with people who are eagerly seeking to recruit people better than they are. Not just employees, but vendors, coaches and even competitors.

That’s Seth Godin on hiring.

But most of us aren’t in “great organizations.” That makes me sad.

Seth says most organizations seek, instead of being great, to hire “people like us.” He continues, “The rationale is that someone too good might not take the job, might get frustrated, might be easily lured away.”

Of course, he is right about most of us. Personally, I’d like us to be great. But we struggle. Running a business is hard. There are forces at work that keep us from doing all that we should. Some are easy to understand, like money. Some aren’t, like emotion. Those forces lead us to rationalize our decisions even when they’re not calculated to lead us to create a great organization.

But the hiring thing is important. It’s critical that we overcome the barriers that keep us hiring “people like us.” We need to examine the forces that keep us from building great organizations.

Why You Make Better Choices When Outsourcing

We see it most visibly when we outsource projects. That’s when it’s obvious that we’re better off when we decide not to hire “people like us.” When we’re outsourcing, we’re usually hiring someone to do something we aren’t smart enough, educated enough, or skilled enough to do ourselves. We want someone better than us.

A case in point is the guy who does our WordPress development. He’s Ukrainian, and he charges about twice what the other Ukrainian developers charge. He’s good. He knows his stuff, and we don’t have to second-guess him. He runs rings around us. We learn each time we review his work.

Thankfully, we’ve got this guy on the team. We’ve had others, and they’re not nearly as good. Recently, we had a guy do a small project, and after four hours of billing, it was clear that we should have just done it ourselves. He couldn’t cut it. He was terrible.

When you outsource a project, it becomes clear that hiring people worse than you means either you have to hire twice or you have to spend four times as much time managing or both. When we outsource projects to the wrong people, they cost us big time.

We’re pretty good at recruiting people better than us when we outsource. The struggle, for us, happens when we hire internally. Somehow it’s different when we outsource. It’s easier for us to hire better than us.

For whatever reason, we’re not intimidated by outsourcing our projects to people better than us. That’s the plan – that’s the goal. That’s what we’re trying to do.

It’s Time to Hire Up

Hiring up—finding people better than us—is hard though when we’re hiring employees in-house. That’s when the rationalizations Seth Godin mentions set in and take control.

But we’re disabling ourselves when we let those rationalizations take control. We’re making a mistake. We’re disadvantaging our firm, our team, and our clients.

Hire smarter. Elevate your game.

You hire better when you pick an accountant, right? The same is true of the lawyer you hire when you need legal help on a personal matter. Why not hire up all the time? Why not let go of the rationalizations that hold your team back?

Ultimately, when it comes to getting things done, you’ll either be fixing your employees’ mistakes or having your employee fix yours. That’s a pretty simple choice.