Why some hires are hard, and which constraint to remove
Posted on 1 September 2026 by Lydia Sinclair FREC
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A partner told me recently that the role could not possibly be that difficult to fill. There were thousands of tax managers in the country, he said, and he only needed one of them.
He was right about the thousands. He was wrong about everything that followed.
Six months later the seat was still empty, and the reason had nothing to do with how many tax managers exist.
The task is never the task
When a firm describes a vacancy, it usually comes out as a single job. Find an audit manager. Find a tax senior. Find someone to take over the portfolio when Jane retires.
That is not one task. It is a list of conditions that all have to be true about the same human being at the same moment.
Take that tax manager. The person needs to be at the right technical level. They need to be within a commute of your office, or willing to relocate. They need to be genuinely open to moving, not just flattered to be asked. They need to not already work at a firm your recruiter has agreed not to approach. They need to fit inside your salary band. And they need to be available in the window you actually care about, which is usually before Christmas.
Six conditions. Not one of them is unreasonable. That is exactly the problem, because reasonable conditions are the ones nobody thinks to question.
What a fitness challenge has to do with it
I am nine days into 75 Hard at the moment, and it has clarified something I have known for years without being able to explain properly.
The rules are two workouts a day with one outdoors, four litres of water, a food plan with no deviation, no alcohol, ten pages of a non-fiction book, and a daily progress photo. Seventy-five consecutive days, and one miss puts you back at day one.
Read that list one line at a time and none of it is difficult. A forty-five minute walk is not difficult. Drinking water is not difficult. Ten pages takes twenty minutes.
The difficulty is entirely in the simultaneity. It is holding all seven on the day the school run goes wrong, a client rings at six, and it is raining sideways.
Nobody fails 75 Hard on the walking. They fail on the day the constraints collide. And the reason firms consistently misjudge how hard a hire will be is that they assess each condition on its own, where every one of them looks perfectly manageable.
The arithmetic, with real numbers
Here is what it looks like in practice.
Earlier this year I built a longlist for a single audit role in Sussex. I started with 336 people, which was everyone within about 25 miles who had ever worked in audit, drawn from my own database and my network.
Filtering to the level the role actually needed, audit senior through to manager, took that to 34. That is the genuine population of people in the patch who could do the job.
Of those 34, thirteen worked at firms I have promised not to approach. Clients, or firms where I have given an undertaking to leave the staff alone. That is permanent, not a decision about one vacancy.
Which left 21 people. Not 21 who wanted to move. Twenty-one I was allowed to pick up the phone to.
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The shape of that is what matters. Every constraint you add does not shave a little off the pool. It multiplies against everything before it. As a rough illustration, if six separate conditions each rule out half the remaining people, you finish with under two per cent of where you started. Nobody sets out to design a brief that reaches two per cent of a market. It happens one sensible requirement at a time.
Which of your constraints is actually load-bearing
This is the part worth sitting with, because it is the only real decision available to you.
When a role sticks, the instinct is to apply more effort. Chase the recruiter. Re-post the advert. Hold out for the right person on the basis that they must be out there somewhere. None of that changes anything, because the problem is arithmetic rather than effort. The only thing that moves a stacked brief is taking a condition off the list.
There is a simple test for whether a condition deserves its place. If the right person walked in tomorrow, and they were excellent on everything except this one thing, would you turn them down? If the answer is an immediate yes, it is load-bearing. If you hesitate, it is habit.
In my experience, running that test honestly across a practice brief tends to produce the same pattern.
Genuinely load-bearing, most of the time: the technical ability to do the work, and anything the regulator requires. If a role needs someone who can sign audits, they need to be a responsible individual. There is no flexibility in that and there should not be.
Usually habit: the sector experience. A capable auditor can be taught charity or academy work in a season if somebody is willing to teach them. Also usually habit: insisting on a particular size of previous firm. Someone from a top ten firm can absolutely adapt to an independent practice. The real question is whether they want to, which is a conversation, not a filter.
Somewhere in between: geography, which is real but is the cheapest thing to soften. A day at home a week widens a search radius more than almost any other single change, and costs you nothing.
And then salary, which is nearly always relaxable and nearly always relaxed last. Firms will sit on an empty seat for six months, absorbing the lost fees and the pressure on everybody covering the work, before they will consider the three thousand pounds that would have closed it in September.
The reset rule
There is one more thing 75 Hard gets right about difficulty, which is the reset. Miss anything at all, and you go back to the beginning.
Recruitment has a version of this that firms rarely price in. A candidate who is enthusiastic in week one, and then hears nothing for a fortnight, does not resume where they left off when you finally come back to them. Their interest resets. In the meantime they have taken another call, or talked themselves out of moving, or mentioned it to their partner who asked why they were bothering.
When the addressable pool is twenty-one people, and three firms in the county are working from the same twenty-one, the speed of your process stops being a matter of courtesy. It is the one part of this you completely control, and it is frequently the only thing separating the firm that hires from the firm still advertising in November.
Advertising, and when it stops working
None of this makes advertising useless. For roles where the pool is genuinely wide, at trainee and semi-senior level in a decent-sized town, an advert does a perfectly good job and there is no reason to spend more.
It stops working at the point where the stack collapses the pool below the number of people who are likely to be actively looking on any given week. Past that line, advertising is not a slower route to the same outcome. It is a route to a different and worse one, because the people who apply are, by definition, the ones who are looking, and the twenty-one are mostly not.
That is the honest case for running a search rather than posting a role. Not that it is better in some general sense, but that below a certain population size an advert cannot reach the people who could actually do the job.
Back to school
My youngest went back this week. New shoes, the usual negotiation about the water bottle, and a house that has gone quiet for the first time since July. Practice offices feel much the same. Everyone is back, the year has a shape to it again, and people start making the decisions they parked over the summer.
Which is why the next ten weeks matter more than the ten before them.
Final thought
If you have a role that has been open since the spring, the problem is very unlikely to be the advert, the market, or a shortage of effort from anybody involved.
Go and look at the list of things you are insisting on. Ask yourself, one at a time, whether you would really say no to an excellent person who failed on that condition alone.
Usually one or two of them are load-bearing. The rest are just how you have always done it.
If it would help to talk through a brief that has stopped moving, I am happy to do that with nothing attached to it. You can see how a proper search runs at protalent.eu/protalent-professional, or just pick up the phone.
Lydia Sinclair FREC · ProTalent Limited
lydia@protalent.co · 01273 491 852 · protalent.eu