A perfect CV may not even be enough to land a job

The history, the reputation, the glowing skin and dazzling teeth. And then, they open their mouth. Disaster.

In their recent book, Who, two employment consultants, Geoff Smart and Randy Street, say: "One of the painful truths of hiring is this. It is hard to see people for who they really are."

They describe one CEO firing someone by saying: "Look, I hired your résumé. But unfortunately, what I got was you."

In one of the most popular business memoirs ever written, Lee Iacocca, the former chief executive of Ford and Chrysler, had this to say about hiring: "There are two really important things about a candidate that you just can't learn from a short job interview. The first is whether he's lazy, and the second is whether he's got any horse sense."

Moira Benigson, one of Britain's top executive recruiters, agrees: "Employers sometimes hire the name of the company the candidate has worked for rather than the candidate."

The companies everyone wants to hire from change. One day it may be Abercrombie & Fitch, the next Tesco.

Today, says Benigson, it's Apple. Companies are desperate to hire people who can bring some of the computer firm's corporate magic.

In many companies, hiring is a slapdash, casual affair, relying on voodoo terms like "gut instinct" and "corporate fit". When people talk about a "perfect" hire it is not always clear what they mean.

Often it is code for people the hirer feels comfortable with. Smart and Street recommend applying the same diligence to hiring as one would to an acquisition.

They describe one candidate who seemed terrific on every measure but admitted only after multiple rounds of interviews and reference checks that the reason he left his last job was that he had slapped his CEO in the face.

Aaron Patzer, a 27-year-old technology entrepreneur who recently made £100 million selling his personal finance company Mint.com, offered this advice in a recent profile: "At Mint we had a rigorous hiring process.

"For tech people, we might screen 50 candidates and hire one. For managers we used a technique called top grading, which reveals patterns in behaviour. In my time at Mint I only fired two people and only one left voluntarily."

Top grading is a system that tries to focus the interview process on outcomes and achievements rather than personality.

The perfect candidate is not necessarily the nicest, or the one every interviewer gets along with, but the one most likely to achieve the best results in the job.

It requires companies to lay down clear criteria and expectations for the job and then to gauge whether the candidate will meet them.

It also means they must deploy the candidate in that role. Often companies hire "athletes" - people they believe will do well at any aspect of business, when what they really want are specialists.

Guy Nadivi, a columnist for Forbes magazine, maintains that "perfect" candidates run the risk of being dissatisfied employees.

"Hiring job candidates who are not perfectly qualified for a position can actually make better sense in the long term," he says.

"The employer can get someone who is grateful for the challenge and opportunity for growth, and thus more inclined to be loyal - and that person is likely to cost less than a perfect candidate, too."

Another risk of finding seemingly perfect candidates in this economy is that they will use the opportunity you provide as a parking spot until something better comes along.

Benigson compares hiring to performing medical transplants.

It is not just a question of finding a great candidate, but rather one who will fit in well in your company. "Does the transplant take? Is there tissue rejection?"

Often, great people are hired and then put into roles where their talents are not maximised. Or they cannot adapt to a different mode of doing business.

Says Benigson: "If Philip Green was looking for someone very entrepreneurial to work for him it would make little sense to hire someone who had done very well at Unilever in a highly corporate setting."