The People You Need Aren't Applying

Read the recruitment advertising of any ten agencies and you will struggle to tell them apart.

Good salary. Clear progression. A creative, motivated team. Drinks on a Friday.

Every agency writes a version of this. They wrote it ten years ago. They are still writing it now, almost word for word, and they are still surprised when the best people do not come.

The surface reading is that the market is tight and talent is scarce. Both are true. But neither explains the real problem, which is that the words stopped working a while ago and most leaders have not noticed. The ads still attract applications, so the machinery looks like it is running. What the numbers hide is who is no longer applying at all.

The people worth hiring are screening for something before they reach the line about salary. They are looking for three things, and they read them as evidence of how a business actually treats the people inside it.

Culture. Cause. Coaching.

Not as perks. As proof.

Culture is what happens in the room

Culture is not what is written on the wall. It is what happens in the room when something goes wrong.

Senior talent knows this, which is why values posters and table tennis do nothing for them. They read culture in how decisions actually get made, how disagreement is handled, and who gets protected when a piece of work fails. They can usually tell within two meetings.

What good looks like is a leader who can describe a real moment the culture held under pressure. Not a slide about behaviours. A situation, with names and consequences, where the business did the harder thing because of who it is. People remember those stories. They are also very good at noticing when a leader does not have one.

Cause is what the work is for

People want their effort to point at something larger than the next quarter.

This is not about performative purpose, and talented people are quick to smell it. They are looking for a genuine reason the business exists that survives contact with a P&L. The clearest signal is not what a company celebrates. It is what it is willing to say no to.

Movements like B Corp matter here, less as a badge and more as a shorthand. They tell a candidate that a business has been willing to be measured on something other than margin. Whether or not the certification itself means much to them, the willingness to be held to that standard does. It reads as a company that has decided what it is for.

Coaching is the promise that you will not plateau

This is the one most leaders underestimate.

Expertise is the price of entry, not the offer. The best people already have the skills. What they are deciding is whether a business will develop them or simply use them up. They want their professional lives enriched through real development and mentoring, and they want it to reach all the way to the top, not stop at a junior training budget.

Coaching here means something rigorous, not motivational speaking and not therapy. What good looks like is a business where the leaders are coached too. Where development is treated as part of how the company operates, rather than a benefit listed on a careers page. People can tell the difference between an organisation that grows its leaders and one that quietly burns through them.

The ad has not changed. The audience has.

There is an old line that if you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you have got.

The agencies still describing the job will keep attracting people who want a job. The people they actually need are reading for something else, and they are reading it everywhere except the careers page. In how the business behaves under pressure. In what it refuses to do. In whether the leaders themselves are still growing.

Talent does not leave for better prospects. It leaves for better proof.