"We can't find talent" is the phrase I've heard most as a justification — and it is almost never true. The market does not have a shortage of qualified professionals. It has an excess of job listings that sound exactly the same as each other. When a strategic vacancy has been open for months, the first question should not be "where is the candidate?", but "what are we offering that nobody wants to respond to?".
1. The Disconnection in Talent Attraction
I have seen the same pattern repeat, under different names, in companies that swear "there is no talent in the market":
- They ask for a job instead of offering a challenge: They publish a list of twenty operational duties when the professional they seek wants to know what real problem they will solve, with what decision-making margin, and with what scope. Nobody at a high level is excited to read a duties manual.
- They ask for the impossible and pay it as if it were normal: Ten different competencies, leadership of large teams, total availability — in exchange for average compensation. That disconnection between what they demand and what they offer pushes away exactly the profile they say they are looking for.
- They complicate what should be simple: The candidate attaches their CV and then has to re-fill every field by hand in a portal from ten years ago. Or they are contacted with a generic, copied-and-pasted message that mentions nothing specific about their background. In both cases, the message they receive is the same: "we do not value your time."
- They hide key information: The salary range, the modality, what the real team is like — kept under the argument of "that is discussed in the interview." That silence achieves nothing but distrust before the first call.
And perhaps the most revealing sign: promising one thing and making them live another. If your job listing talks about innovation and agility, but the process has five bureaucratic filters and weeks of silence, the senior candidate doesn't need you to tell them — they already noticed.
2. Five Rules for Precise Selection
None of this is fixed with more job portals or more recruitment budget. It is fixed with precision:
- Write the vacancy as a value proposition, not as an inventory of tasks.
- Simplify the application until there is no friction.
- Be transparent from the first message, not from the third interview.
- Evaluate by problem-solving capacity, not by an endless list of secondary requirements.
- Treat talent attraction as a relationship built, not as an emergency put out.
Before publishing your next vacancy, ask yourself: if I were the candidate I want to attract, would I respond to this? The talent that transforms an organization is not scarce. It is waiting for a proposal worth responding to. You do not attract the best talent by projecting impossible expectations. You attract them by showing, from the first contact, that your company does what it says.