July 22, 2025
Hiring Managers, Don’t Let Yourselves Become Recruiting Roadkill
"Road-Kill Squirrel Remembered as Frantic, Indecisive."
That's one of my favorite headlines from The Onion, the satirical newspaper. I was reminded of it last weekend, when I read a roundup of other classic headlines from the paper, like "Standard Deviation Not Enough for Perverted Statistician."
The Road-Kill Squirrel headline stuck with me, not just because I've run over my share of squirrels, but because the unfocused and unproductive behavior exhibited by the squirrel is common in humans.
Occasionally, I see this same pattern in hiring managers. About 10 years ago, I worked with a startup CEO to recruit a commercialization leader for his team. Together we developed a detailed job description and candidate specification, and then I got to work.
There were a lot of interested candidates, and the search should have closed quickly. It didn't.
The CEO changed direction every couple of weeks. Despite my coaching, the pattern continued. Progress slowed to a crawl, because each time we developed a new group of candidates the target changed. With perseverance the search got done, but it should have been easier and much faster.
I understood his predicament. As a startup CEO, he was under enormous pressure to get everything right. The stakes felt impossibly high—hire the wrong person and the company could fail. But indecision driven by his quest for perfection became the enemy of progress.
You can't find something if you don't know what you're looking for. That's why defining a detailed candidate specification is essential before starting the search for a new executive.
During the search itself, it's normal to refine the specification as you meet candidates. Radical changes to the specification, however, should never happen except in extraordinary circumstances, like an important change in business conditions or funding.
The best hiring managers force themselves to make tough decisions upfront about what they really need. They resist the temptation to keep moving the goalposts. They understand that while no candidate will be perfect, a very good one who gets hired quickly is infinitely better than the perfect one who never materializes.
Don't be the squirrel. Know where you're going before you start, and then stick to the plan.
