Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn

From http://blog.summation.net/

Noise goes up but the quality stays the same

Hiring is always hard.  The hardest thing to do at a company is the recruiting and hiring.  It was really hard when the economy was doing well.  Paradoxically, for certain industries (especially those reliant on innovation such as those in the tech space), it's even harder when times are tough.

That's right ... hiring in tough economic times can actually be much harder than when times are good.   In a downturn, the amount of resumes from C-Players massively increases while the amount of resumes from A-Players probably remains the same. 

Never settle

First, let's assume you've already bought into the "When Good Isn’t Good Enough" philosophy of always trying to hire A-players because they are just so much more productive than B-players (an 'A-Player' by definition is incredibly productive and smart and  has that 'it', that rockstar-esque factor that makes everyone want to work with her).  That means you won’t settle for people who are good but instead hold out for people that are great.

Great people – the A-Players – are a very different breed from the good (B-Players) and mediocre (C-Players).  Great people are more likely to be employed with a company since a great person is often over 3 times as productive as a good person.  Joel Spolsky argues in Smart & Gets Things Done that an A-player is anywhere from 5-10 times as productive. Joel looked at coursework data from a Yale computer science class and found that the fastest students finished their workload as much as ten times faster than the slowest students (average was 3-4 times faster).