"The Purple Squirrel"

I attended a networking meeting over the weekend at the Beltway Job Search Partners in McLean, Virginia. One of the attendees – I won’t name her because I want to respect her privacy but will be happy to post it if she reads this and grants permission – asked how my search was going. After I told her about my recent interviews that ultimately culminated in getting a “recommendation for hire” that was somehow still turned down ("Our business plan has changed, so we won't be moving forward with this position...we've decided we need a different set of skills..."), she looked at me and said, “Sounds like they wanted the Purple Squirrel.”

“The what?” I asked, unsure of her meaning.

“The Purple Squirrel,” she said, smiling. “They want that special animal that has the right colors, one green eye, one blue eye, and knows how to scale all the tall trees but which doesn’t exist. All companies want that.”

I laughed along with her at the time, but as I sat down for the morning’s discussion, I thought about what she had said. And I quickly concluded that she was absolutely right.

Assume someone leaves a particular position at a firm. She retires, takes another job, or quits for any number of conflicting reasons. What does the company do? It takes her position description – which probably hasn’t been updated since she took the job to begin with – and then adds any number of other responsibilities that other managers are looking to offload and don’t want any more, and then it posts the description (probably with the old salary range) and waits to see what comes in. I compare this to fishing in fresh waters with spoiled bait – you’re just waiting to see what comes along and bites, but then you’re surprised that you keep having to throw back whatever you catch.

We’ve all seen these sorts of descriptions – see which ones you recognize:

• “Wanted: Individual achiever who knows how to be a team player!”
• “Taskmaster with strong interpersonal skills.”
• “Professional with 10-15 years experience…bachelor’s degree (master’s preferred)…Salary: low to mid thirties.”
• “Preferably with 10-15 years of search-engine optimization experience…”
• “Experienced client-relations manager with dynamic project management and accounting skills…”

And my personal favorite –

• “Comfortable with ambiguity”

We’ve all heard about how difficult it is for companies to find good, reliable talent, but if so many people are out of work and pounding repeatedly on doors, it would seem that a lot more could be accomplished if companies would simply be willing to hire capable people who are willing to learn new skills instead of spending countless months searching for the personnel equivalent of a Swiss Army knife – or a mythical worker who exists only in the mindset of overly demanding managers.