There is a job description making the rounds right now that asks for fifteen years of experience in a technology that has existed for nine. We see a version of it every week. The spec lists every skill, every certification, every industry the company has ever touched — and somewhere near the bottom, a salary band that wouldn’t move a candidate who has half of it. This is the purple squirrel. And the search built around it almost never closes.
The term has been in recruiting for years, but the behavior is getting worse, not better. The more data a hiring team has, the more boxes they feel entitled to check. The result is a profile so specific that no living person matches it. You’re not running a search anymore. You’re hunting an animal that doesn’t exist.
What a purple squirrel actually is
A purple squirrel is a search spec so narrow that the qualified candidate pool is effectively zero. Not small — zero. The role might be real and the need urgent, but the requirements have been stacked so high that satisfying all of them at once is a statistical impossibility.
The tell isn’t any single requirement. Each one, on its own, sounds reasonable. The problem is the pile. When you add a tenth must-have to a list that already had nine, you didn’t make the search more precise. You cut the candidate pool by another order of magnitude — and nobody in the room noticed, because each line felt justified.
The three signs you’re chasing one
We can usually spot a purple squirrel in the first read of the spec. Three signals show up almost every time:
- Fifteen or more hard must-haves. Not preferences — non-negotiables. When the "required" section runs longer than the job summary, the math is already broken. A human being who satisfies fifteen independent conditions at the level you want is rounding-error rare.
- A demand for one specific competitor’s experience. "Must have worked at [named company]" feels like a shortcut to quality. Actually, it shrinks your pool to a few dozen people, most of whom are not looking — and signals that you’re hiring for a logo, not a capability.
- A salary band the spec can’t support. The clearest sign of all. When the compensation sits at the market midpoint but the requirements describe the top five percent, the search is a contradiction in writing. The people who match won’t answer. The people who answer won’t match.
Why smart teams keep doing it
Purple squirrels aren’t written by careless people. They’re usually written by committees — and that’s exactly the problem. Five stakeholders each add the two things they care most about, nobody removes anything, and the spec becomes the union of everyone’s wish list instead of a description of the actual job.
Underneath the committee dynamic is something quieter: fear of the tradeoff. Naming your top three priorities means admitting the other twelve are negotiable — and admitting a thing is negotiable feels like lowering the bar. So the list grows. It feels rigorous. Specifically, it feels safer to ask for everything than to be accountable for choosing. But a spec that refuses to choose isn’t rigorous. It’s just undecided in writing, and it pushes the decision onto a market that will never deliver the impossible.
What to do instead
The fix is not lowering standards. It’s ranking them. Before we open a search, we force the spec through one exercise: name the three things that, if a candidate has them, make the rest coachable or secondary. Everything else moves to a wish list — nice to have, never a screen-out.
This does two things at once. It widens the real pool to people who can actually do the job, and it makes the search faster, because every résumé now has a clear decision rule instead of fifteen competing ones. Counterintuitively, the candidates get better. When you stop screening on trivia, you start seeing the people whose track record matters more than their keyword match.
The purple squirrel is a comfortable place to hide. The list looks thorough, the bar looks high, and the search looks disciplined — right up until ninety days pass with no hire. The teams that close are the ones willing to say, out loud, which three things actually matter. The rest is a wish. Treat it like one.
Sitting on a search that won’t close? Send us the spec — we’ll tell you which three requirements are doing the work.
