Dear Hiring Manager, Maybe You Are the Problem

If you have hundreds of applicants and still cannot find one person to hire, maybe the problem is not the applicants.

We live in a strange moment in which companies complain constantly about how difficult it is to find talent while being surrounded by more educated, experienced and internationally mobile professionals than probably at any other point in history. Open LinkedIn and it is normal to find a vacancy with more than 100 applicants within days. A few weeks later, the same position is still open. Sometimes it is reposted, sometimes with almost exactly the same description, and apparently nobody among those hundreds of people managed to possess the magical combination of qualities required to do the job.

There are obvious exceptions here. Some companies advertise positions they do not seriously intend to fill. I have seen this personally. I was laid off by a company that kept advertising roles while dismissing dozens of people working in those same areas. Sometimes vacancies are kept open to collect CVs, maintain a pipeline, test the market or simply create the impression that a company is growing. Those cases are dishonest in their own way, but they are not what interests me here.

What interests me are the companies that actually want to hire somebody and still somehow spend months failing to do it.

At what point does a hiring manager look at a position that has been open for three months, with hundreds of applicants and several rejected interview rounds, and consider the possibility that the candidates are not the problem?

This possibility seems to be strangely absent from most discussions about recruitment. The company defines the requirements, decides the salary, designs the interview process and chooses who gets rejected, yet when the position remains empty the explanation is very often that the market is difficult or that there is not enough talent available. The hiring process itself is treated almost as a fixed law of nature.

And some of these processes deserve considerably more scrutiny.

It has become completely normal for relatively ordinary management positions to involve four, five or even six stages. First there is the recruiter, then the hiring manager, then someone from the team, then perhaps a case study, then a presentation, followed by another conversation with senior management. In some cases, candidates spend hours preparing work for a company they may never join, followed by several more hours explaining their career to different people who could presumably read the same CV.

The argument is usually that companies need to be careful because hiring the wrong person is expensive. That is true. It is also one of those statements that sounds sensible enough to justify almost anything. By the same logic, a company could conduct twelve interviews and ask for a three-week unpaid trial because hiring mistakes cost money. At some point caution becomes dysfunction.

The requirements themselves have also become increasingly detached from the reality of how people build careers.

A company wants somebody with ten years of experience, but preferably several of those years in the exact same industry. They need leadership experience, but managing a team of 15 may somehow not count if the job description says 30. They need experience with a particular piece of software even when competing systems do essentially the same thing. They want strategic thinking, operational knowledge, strong analytical skills, stakeholder management, transformation experience and an impressive list of technical competencies.

Nothing wrong with wanting good people, of course. The problem starts when all of these preferences quietly become requirements and the company is then surprised that very few people satisfy all of them.

Compensation makes this even more entertaining.

Some employers essentially write the profile of an exceptional candidate and then attach the salary of an average one. They want somebody experienced enough to walk into the organisation and immediately understand the job, independent enough to require little support, senior enough to influence leadership, technical enough to understand the details and commercially aware enough to understand the business. Then they discover that candidates with exactly that profile have their own expectations regarding salary, flexibility and working conditions.

This is then described as a talent shortage.

It may simply be a pricing problem.

If I put my apartment on the market for twice its real value and nobody buys it, I do not have a shortage of buyers. I have misunderstood the market. Yet in recruitment we seem unusually reluctant to apply this very basic logic.

There is also something in modern hiring that increasingly feels less like trying to identify the right person and more like looking for reasons to eliminate people.

A candidate may have done essentially the same job for years but in another industry, and that becomes a concern. Someone may have led a slightly smaller team, so apparently there is uncertainty about whether they could lead a larger one. Another person may have worked with a competing software platform and is therefore missing a requirement that could probably be learned in a few weeks. Eventually you can reject almost anyone if you look closely enough.

What I find particularly absurd is that many of the same companies will publish endless statements about wanting people with different backgrounds, different perspectives and different ways of thinking, while their job descriptions are designed to find somebody whose career looks almost identical to the person who previously occupied the position.

You cannot simultaneously demand difference and demand that somebody has already spent ten years doing exactly what you do, exactly how you do it.

People learn. This should not be a controversial statement, yet modern recruitment often behaves as if employees arrive as finished products. Companies used to hire people who had the foundations to do a job and expected them to learn the rest. Today there is sometimes an expectation that another employer should already have trained the person perfectly for your specific vacancy before you hire them.

The fixation on interview performance creates another distortion. Interviews are obviously necessary, but being good at interviews and being good at a job are not the same thing. There are candidates who have spent enough time interviewing to know exactly how to answer every behavioural question, how to structure every success story and how to turn every weakness into a charming lesson about personal development. That may make them excellent interviewees. It tells you something about their ability to communicate and prepare, but it does not magically reveal how they will perform six months later when the work is difficult and nobody is asking them STAR-method questions.

The reverse is also true. Some extremely competent people are mediocre interviewees. They may be nervous, overly direct, less polished or simply less interested in performing the strange theatre that recruitment has become. Rejecting them may still be the correct decision in some cases, but pretending that a collection of interviews gives us scientific certainty about future performance is nonsense.

There is also a cost to leaving positions open that receives far less attention than the cost of a bad hire.

The work does not disappear while recruitment continues. Somebody is doing it. Usually the existing team, the manager, or both. Projects move more slowly, responsibilities get redistributed, people work longer hours and organisations lose productivity while waiting for the candidate who satisfies every box on the spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, recruiters keep recruiting and managers keep interviewing.

If ten managers spend hours interviewing candidates over several months, there is already a cost. If a team operates below capacity for six months, there is a cost. If strong candidates withdraw because another company can make a decision in two weeks rather than two months, there is a cost.

For some reason, those costs rarely seem to create the same anxiety as the theoretical possibility of hiring somebody who turns out not to be perfect.

I am not arguing for lower standards. Companies should reject candidates who cannot do the job. Senior positions deserve proper scrutiny and nobody should be hired simply because a vacancy has been open for too long.

But there is a point where high standards become an excuse for indecision, and where careful hiring becomes a search for a person who does not exist.

If a vacancy has been open for months and you have rejected dozens of credible candidates, the responsible management decision is not automatically to continue searching. It is to question the assumptions behind the search.

Perhaps the salary does not match the profile. Perhaps half of the requirements are preferences disguised as necessities. Perhaps the interview process has become an internal ritual that nobody has had the courage to simplify. Perhaps five people have been given veto power over a decision that one competent manager should be able to make. Perhaps the company has become so afraid of making a bad hire that it has forgotten that making no hire is also a decision, and sometimes an expensive one.

And perhaps, after looking at all of that, the conclusion will still be that the candidates really were not good enough.

Fair enough.

But if every candidate is wrong for months on end, it is at least worth considering the other possibility.

Dear Hiring Manager, maybe you are the problem.