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In a recruitment crisis, you never get the best person for the job. Usually, you just get the best of a bad bunch.

Daily, I wince at the quality produced by a colleague. No matter what advice is offered about best practices, they consistently ignore it.

But then I recall their predecessors: a series of employees who lasted just weeks before finally admitting defeat. At least this colleague is moderately self-sufficient.

The risk of setting standards too high is that you tip them over the edge, going from at least doing something to deciding to quit because that standard demands too much work.

Instead, we must tell ourselves that they’re good enough. We must recall, too, our desperation to recruit to a post before this filled only by duds.

Thus do we temper our expectations. If higher-up authorities should come knocking to ask why we’re falling short of our statutory obligations, we shall just have to appeal to this reality.

We cannot recruit the best of the best because they are usually motivated by the pay they think they deserve. As is universally acknowledged, you generally get what you pay for.

Your only hope is a team of talented introverts incapable of selling themselves at interview, who will hold the service together long after they might otherwise have moved on.

This the world of minimum standards, from top to bottom. Unfortunately, sometimes those standards are a matter of life and death. That’s when a recruitment crisis really turns into an unmitigated disaster.