When the must-have isn’t
Most stalled searches carry a fake requirement bundled in with the real ones. Finding it is usually how the shortlist appears.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
Key takeaways
- Most stalled searches carry a fake requirement — a proxy that got promoted to a must-have and never questioned.
- The tell is a requirement nobody can explain in terms of the work — only in terms of what the last person had.
- Retire the fake must-have and the shortlist usually appears — it was there all along, filtered out.
Every stalled search has a passenger requirement.
When a senior search drags, the instinct is to blame the market — the talent isn’t there, the band is too low, the location is wrong. Occasionally that’s true. Far more often, the search is quietly enforcing a requirement that doesn’t belong on the must-have list. A specific industry background. A named tool. A degree from a particular tier. Something that was a reasonable preference and got hardened into a filter that now screens out the people who’d actually do the job best.
These requirements are hard to spot because they arrive wearing the same clothes as the real ones. They’re on the brief, everyone nodded, so they feel load-bearing. But a real must-have can be explained in terms of what the role has to accomplish. A fake one can only be explained in terms of what the last successful person happened to have.
“When a search won’t move, we don’t look harder. We look at the requirements list for the one nobody can defend, and we ask why it’s there.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
The test: can you tie it to the work?
The way to find the fake must-have is to make every requirement earn its place against a single question — what does this let the person do that the role actually demands? “Has scaled a data function from twenty to two hundred” survives that test; the challenge of the role is scale. “Comes from a competitor in the same vertical” usually doesn’t; it’s a comfort, a proxy for domain knowledge that a fast learner acquires in a quarter.
When you retire the passenger requirement, the shortlist tends to appear almost immediately — the right people were in the market the whole time, sitting just outside the filter. The work isn’t finding new candidates. It’s giving the ones who were always qualified permission to count.
One pattern worth knowing, every week.
The Signal is our weekly read on the senior GCC talent market — one chart, one pattern, no noise. Written from live placement data.
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