What you’ll learn
- Why roles that stay open for months reveal design problems, not talent scarcity
- How requirements accumulate into wish lists nobody can fulfill
- What separates credentials from the capabilities that predict performance
- When specialized skills justify narrow searches versus when they don’t
- How to redesign roles before writing job descriptions that waste time
Do you know what a “purple squirrel” is?
It’s recruiter slang for that impossible-to-find candidate. This is someone with the exact combination of skills and experience an employer demands, almost as rare as spotting a purple squirrel in the wild. The phrase captures something most hiring managers don’t want to admit: sometimes the problem isn’t the talent market. It’s the role itself.
Early in my career, we got a call about a position that had been open for almost a year. The job description was pure purple squirrel territory. They needed a senior manager who could balance high-level strategy with hands-on execution, travel extensively, had deep industry experience, and possessed specific expertise with a certain medical device that only a handful of people in North America had ever worked with.
After an exhausting search, we found that person. Every box checked. Every requirement met. The client was thrilled.
Within a year, they left. Not because they couldn’t do the work. But because the role itself was not sustainable, cobbled together from multiple jobs that should have been separate positions. The requirements weren’t wrong individually. Together, they described work no reasonable person could sustain long-term.
That experience taught me something most hiring managers learn the hard way: when a role stays open for months while you reject dozens of qualified candidates, the job description isn’t being selective. It’s revealing a design problem you haven’t acknowledged yet.
How purple squirrel job descriptions happen
Purple squirrel briefs don’t start out unreasonable. They accumulate.
Someone leaves and you describe not just what they did, but what you wish they’d done better. Budgets tighten and two roles become one. A new project adds requirements nobody questions. The executive team weighs in with their own must-haves. Marketing says this person needs to be technical. Engineering says they need to understand customers. Finance says they need P&L experience.
Each requirement sounds defensible in isolation. But stack them all together and you’ve described someone who barely exists, and if they do exist, they’re already employed somewhere else making significantly more than your budget allows.
The real problem is that these long lists of requirements aren’t actually what drive job performance. They’re proxies. Credentials, specific tools, years of experience are attributes that we assume predict success but often don’t. We list them because they’re easy to write in job descriptions and easy to scan on applicant profiles. But a decade of experience doing something poorly doesn’t predict future performance. An MBA from a top school might mean someone interviewed well at age twenty-two, not that they can deliver the specific outcomes your role requires today.
Here’s the dangerous part: when you narrow your search to a tiny pool of candidates, you’re not being strategic. You’re creating organizational fragility. If that person leaves, gets sick, or burns out, you’re back to square one with a role that takes a year to fill. That’s not a hiring strategy. That’s a single point of failure.
What predicts performance
The disconnect between what we list and what actually matters shows up clearly when you compare credentials to capabilities.
Consider what “ten years of industry experience” really means. You’re hoping it translates to someone who can quickly learn your market, build relationships with stakeholders, and make sound decisions under uncertainty. But ten years might be the same year repeated ten times. Plenty of people have a decade in an industry and still struggle with challenges or adaptability when conditions change.
Or take “must have used this exact tool.” What you actually need is someone who can solve problems, master new systems quickly, and figure out workflows that work for your team. Whether they’ve used Salesforce or HubSpot or some other CRM matters far less than whether they understand how to manage a pipeline and think systematically about process.
The pattern repeats across requirements. “Done this exact job before” sounds safe, but what you really need is ownership thinking. You need someone who will make the role their own, see what’s missing, and take responsibility for outcomes rather than just executing tasks. “MBA from a top school” might signal strategic thinking and business acumen, but plenty of people without MBAs can evaluate trade-offs and communicate clearly. Plenty of people with MBAs can’t.
The first set of credentials, specific tools, degrees, are proxies. Easy to list, easy to verify, but not reliably predictive. The second set includes judgment, problem-solving, ownership, and learning agility. These are capabilities. Harder to assess up front, but they’re what actually determines whether someone succeeds in the role six months in.
When you optimize for proxies, you get a tiny candidate pool, months-long search, and no guarantee the person will thrive in a poorly designed role. When you focus on capabilities that actually matter, the pool expands dramatically and you’re evaluating what actually determines success.
When the role itself is the problem
Before you post another job description for a position that’s been open for half a year, stop and ask whether the role makes sense as it’s currently designed.
Sometimes what looks like one job is actually two or three types of work bundled together that require fundamentally different skills and mindsets. High-level strategy and hands-on execution pull in opposite directions. Some people can toggle between both. Most can’t, or if they can, they hate it and burn out fast.
The role needs to be designed as sustainable for any human being over time. If you hired the perfect purple squirrel and they succeeded brilliantly for eighteen months before leaving exhausted, that’s not a hiring win. That’s a design failure you’ll repeat with the next person.
This shows up in other ways too. Roles that require deep industry expertise but also expect someone to learn your specific processes and tools from scratch. Positions that need senior strategic judgment but are scoped at mid-level compensation. Jobs that combine people management with individual contributor work at a volume that makes both suffer. Requirements for in-office presence that eliminate your best candidates for no clear business reasons.
Each constraint might seem reasonable. Together they create an impossible search. And the longer the role stays open, the more expensive the problem becomes. Not just in recruiter fees or opportunity cost, but in team burnout covering the gap, projects that stall, and momentum that slows while you wait for someone who may not exist.
A better starting point
The fix isn’t lowering your standards or settling for less. It’s redesigning the work before you write the job description.
Start with outcomes, not requirements. What needs to change in ninety days? What problems is this person solving? What does success actually look like? A Position Blueprint forces this clarity. It defines what the role needs to accomplish, how you’ll measure it, and what outcomes matter before you list a single qualification. When you start there, purple squirrel job descriptions become much harder to write because you’re focused on what needs to get done, not on describing an idealized person.
Next, examine every requirement and ask whether it’s truly non-negotiable or just a proxy for something else. “Must have used Salesforce” might really mean “needs to manage a pipeline effectively.” Dozens of tools do that. Someone who mastered one CRM can learn another. “Deep industry experience” might really mean “understands how customers make decisions and can build credibility with stakeholders.” That’s learnable with good onboarding and pattern recognition. “Must have ten-plus years” might really mean “needs demonstrated decision-making capability and works independently.” People with five or six years can demonstrate both if you evaluate for capability instead of tenure.
Next, consider whether the role should be split or scoped differently. Can responsibilities be distributed across two sustainable positions instead of one overwhelming job? Can you bring in contract expertise for specialized work rather than requiring one person to have every skill? Can you reduce scope while still achieving the core outcomes that matter? Sometimes the right answer is admitting this isn’t one role when it’s two jobs being forced into a single budget line.
And question your constraints. Does this work really need to be done in a specific location, or are you defaulting to “how we’ve always done it”? Could remote work or global hiring expand the pool without compromising results? Are you requiring credentials that sound impressive but don’t predict whether someone can do this specific work?
Not every skill needs to exist on day one. If someone has strong judgment, ownership thinking, and learning agility but lacks a specific tool or framework, that’s trainable. The question isn’t “Do they know this already?” It’s “Can they learn it fast enough to be effective?” What’s trainable: specific tools, processes, frameworks, domain knowledge. What’s harder to develop: judgment, ownership mindset, learning agility, how someone communicates under pressure. Hire for the capabilities that are hard to teach. Train for the rest.
When you need rare skills
Sometimes specialized expertise is required. Even then, you have options beyond the year-long search.
If you need highly specialized knowledge for a defined period, like pre-launch of a new product, navigating a regulatory change, or building out infrastructure, consider staff augmentation or contract expertise. Bring in someone senior for six to twelve months to solve the immediate problem while building internal capability. You get the expertise when you need it without committing to permanent headcount for a skill set that might not be required long-term.
Or, hire for potential and upskill. Find candidates with seventy to eighty percent of what you need and a track record of learning quickly. You’ll often get someone more loyal and engaged than the purple squirrel who had nowhere left to grow. This is the thirty percent stretch rule in action. Hire for capability and growth potential, not for a perfect match on day one.
And if this expertise is truly critical to your business, one person shouldn’t be your single point of failure anyway. Distribute the knowledge. Document processes. Cross-train team members. Build organizational capability instead of depending on one irreplaceable individual who will eventually leave, get promoted, or burn out.
What it costs to keep searching
Chasing purple squirrels is expensive in ways that don’t show up on a recruiting invoice.
While you search, work doesn’t get done. Projects stall. Teams burn out covering the gap. Momentum slows. You pass over candidates with eighty percent of the skills who could have ramped up and been productive within months, and you’ve interviewed so many, all while holding out for someone with one hundred percent who may never apply.
Even when you finally find someone who checks every box, roles designed around impossible requirements are often unsustainable. They stay eighteen months, burn out, and leave. You’re back to searching again, having spent six figures on recruiting and lost productivity twice over for a role that shouldn’t have been designed that way in the first place.
The math is straightforward. If a one hundred and fifty-thousand-dollar role has been open for twelve months, the opportunity cost is three to four hundred thousand dollars or more in lost productivity, team burnout covering responsibilities, and delayed projects. That’s before factoring in recruiter fees, hiring manager time, and the cost of making a bad hire if you settle out of desperation.
The alternative? Pause to redesign the role, question your assumptions, and get clear on what drives success. It takes a few hours upfront. The return on that time is a faster search, a broader candidate pool, and someone who’s far more likely to succeed because the role was designed for a real human being to do it well.
What changes when you stop chasing
When you redesign roles around outcomes and capabilities instead of credentials and proxies, a few things shift.
The candidate pool expands. Suddenly you’re evaluating people you would have screened out before. Someone with seven years instead of ten, someone from an adjacent industry instead of your exact vertical, someone who used a different tool but has a track record of mastering new systems quickly. You’re no longer limited to a handful of people. You’re choosing from dozens of capable candidates who could succeed if given the chance.
Hiring decisions get clearer because you’re comparing people on the same criteria, not on gut feel or who made the best first impression. Quality improves over time because you’re selecting traits that predict performance, not proxies that sound good but don’t actually matter.
Bias diminishes. When you focus on evidence of outcomes and capabilities, you’re less likely to be swayed by things that don’t predict performance, like where someone went to school, how polished they are in interviews, or whether their career path looks like yours did. You’re now evaluating what actually matters.
Onboarding goes faster. People with strong capabilities ramp up quicker because they take ownership, ask good questions, and learn what they need to learn without waiting to be taught. They don’t need perfect knowledge on day one. They need the capacity to figure things out.
And retention improves because people with these traits tend to be engaged, growth-oriented, and aligned with high-performing teams. They stay longer because they’re successful and valued, not because they were the only person who fit an impossible job description.
The real standard
This isn’t about lowering your bar. It’s about raising it in ways that actually matter.
Chasing purple squirrels feels rigorous because you’re holding out for someone who checks every box. But if those boxes don’t predict performance, you’re just making hiring harder without making it better. You might have to list hiring criteria that’s more challenging to assess, but that will truly determine whether someone succeeds.
The best hiring decisions come from stepping back before you write the job description and asking what does this role need to accomplish, what capabilities will drive that success, and is this role even designed in a way that sets someone up to win? When you start there, the search gets faster, the pool gets broader, and the people you hire are far more likely to thrive, because the role was built for a human being to do it well.
Stop chasing purple squirrels. Start designing roles that real people can succeed in. That’s not lowering your standards, it’s raising them.
If you’re stuck with a role that’s been open for months or rethinking how positions should be scoped before you hire, reach out. We’ve spent years helping companies move from impossible job descriptions to roles that attract strong candidates and set them up to succeed.
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