Has it ever been a goal of yours' to be just average?  I don't know anyone that would outright admit to wanting to be just average.

When you hire someone to perform a service, you do so because either you don't have the appropriate skills or knowledge to accomplish the task or you simply don’t have the time to do it yourself.   But when you do this, you have an expectation about the quality of the work about to be performed.

Let's do a little math.  I will be using statistics here, but I am going to keep it simple (my favorite philosophy: Keep it simple) . When you make a selection of an item at random, you will likely come up with the average item.  This is simply a function of how things are distributed in a perfect world. I know we don’t live in a perfect world. And this can add some complications to this scenario. In reality, the population you select from is a function of what is available to you at your given location. This can bias the outcome in one direction or the other. But overall, the same principles apply.

Below is a bell curve that represents how things are distributed (standard normal distribution). The average value is in the middle (at 0); we typically group, or label, the average as one standard deviation on either side of this average value. You can see that this accounts for 68% of the population. And if you add the group to the left (less than average), you get a total of about 84%.

Do we want average (or less)?  Not really. The graph below illustrates what we are talking about.

When you hire someone, on the average, you are going to get average...or worse. Technically, you will get at or below average about 84% of the time. You really want that group that is only 15% of the population (the above average). The graph below really simplifies the point. It’s hard to find good people to hire.

Hiring someone from the other group (the other 84%) shown on the curve will likely result in one of the following scenarios:

• At best, you will be paying someone to learn how to do it on your project.

• Your problem goes unsolved.

• At worst, you end up with more problems than you had to begin with.

While finding someone qualified can be difficult, it is far better to put in the time to locate someone knowledgeable about your situation than to hire the first person that answers your call.

For some help in how to go about finding someone, please see my earlier post: Guidelines for Using a Reference.