I had a coffee catch-up with a client recently. We were talking about a hire we made a year ago.
I said: “Remember you told me the market’s cooked? You’d been seeing candidates for weeks and none of them felt right?”
He laughed.
“I gave you a brief with twelve bullet points, and you rolled your eyes at me.”
I probably did. I’m not good at hiding my emotions.
“Startup energy. Enterprise experience. Must have led a team of 20+. That was three different people in the brief.”
He nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. No wonder every candidate felt not quite right.”
Here’s the bit that took us both a while to see. When every candidate feels “not quite right”, it’s almost never the market. It’s the brief. And it’s an easy one to miss when you’re in the room, because everyone was being reasonable.
The market has real engineers. They’re not hiding. They’re being screened against a role that hasn’t been defined.
Usually it comes out of a few alignment meetings. Everyone leaves feeling aligned. Nothing got decided. It just got smoothed, and someone stitched five opinions into something the team could ship.
Every week that goes on, you get more tired. The team gets heavier. The next candidate gets closer to “good enough”.
We rebuilt his brief together. Cut twelve bullets to four. Named one non-negotiable outcome for the first 90 days. Killed the contradictions.
Weeks of “not quite right”. Then, once the brief was clean, a shortlist in ten days.
Not because the market got easier. Because the target finally existed.
