Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 5th February 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts. There is a phrase recruiters use when they want to sound funny, but mean something serious: “purple squirrel”.
It’s the perfect candidate. Not the best one. The exact one. The person who already did your job, in your industry, on your stack, with your constraints, under your politics, and can start next week.
Everyone has seen the job description. Almost nobody has seen the person.
I keep running into the same scene. A room. A screen. A calendar invite with too many attendees. The role is “urgent”. The team is stretched. The project plan has stopped being a plan and started being a prayer.
The hiring manager arrives late, sits down, and says something like: “We need someone who has done this exact job before. Ideally at a competitor. Same tools, same market, same compliance rules. They should manage, but stay hands-on. And they need to ramp fast”.
The recruiter nods, opens the document, and the requirements begin to grow. Another tool. Another domain. Another certification. Another line that sounds rigorous, but doesn’t explain the work.
That moment feels like high standards. It also reveals a very old instinct.
When humans feel uncertainty, we tighten our grip. We reduce the world to categories. We choose the familiar over the unknown, even when the unknown is where the future lives. In organizations, that instinct turns into checklists.
A checklist has a comforting property. It can be defended.
If the hire fails, the manager can say: “We were careful. We asked for everything”. The list becomes a kind of liability shield. It protects the decision-maker more than it helps the company.
This is why the purple squirrel shows up most often when the role is messy. When the work is unclear. When the team is under pressure. Pain does not make people generous. Pain makes people narrow. It makes them less willing to teach and more desperate to buy someone who arrives already trained.
Remote work sharpened the problem.
In theory, remote should have helped. Bigger pool, more shots on goal, more unusual talent. In practice, remote also made the noise louder. More applicants. More mismatches. More scanning. More fatigue. When the funnel gets noisy, organizations respond by tightening filters. The world gets larger, the funnel gets narrower, and the seat stays empty.
If you only measure time-to-hire, the purple squirrel looks like a slow process.
The real cost is what happens while the seat remains empty.
Work does not disappear. It moves. A senior engineer becomes an accidental manager. A product lead becomes a coordinator. The most capable people become the shock absorbers because they can handle it, until they can’t. At first it feels like stepping up. Later it feels like being taxed for competence.
This cost rarely appears in dashboards. It shows up in quieter places: the quality of attention, the patience of your best people, the number of good ideas that never get a clean hour to breathe.
There’s another cost that takes longer to notice but lasts longer once it arrives.
Purple squirrel hiring quietly teaches a company that it does not build people. It buys finished products.
If you look closely, you can see how this belief spreads. Onboarding becomes thin because “a great hire should already know”. Coaching becomes rare because “we hired a senior”. Internal moves slow down because people do not match the checklist. Over time, the organization becomes less capable of learning. That is a strange outcome for companies that claim they want innovation.
The purple squirrel is not a talent shortage. It is a confusion between similarity and safety.
Similarity feels safe because it’s easy to explain. “They’ve done this exact thing before” is a sentence that stands up well in a post-mortem. “They learn fast and stay calm under uncertainty” is harder to defend, even when it’s the trait you actually needed.
Once you notice this, you start seeing the same pattern outside hiring. Teams copy competitors because it’s safer than being wrong in public. Leaders add process because it’s safer than trusting judgment. People chase credentials because it’s safer than admitting they are still learning. The surface looks like rigor. The engine is fear.
I’ve seen this story end three ways.
In the first ending, the company keeps hunting. Months pass. The spec becomes stricter because the pain becomes louder. The team ships late, or ships tired, or ships something smaller than they should have. Eventually someone good joins, and everyone celebrates, but the company paid twice. Once in compensation, and again in lost momentum.
In the second ending, the company “compromises” but not in a useful way. They hire someone close, then expect them to behave like the imaginary perfect person anyway. The ramp is vague. Priorities are fuzzy. Feedback comes late. When the person struggles, the organization calls it a bad hire, even though the system was designed for a myth.
In the third ending, the organization does something simple that feels oddly difficult: it stops trying to buy certainty.
In this case, instead of describing a biography, the hiring manager defines an outcome. In 90 days, this person needs to deliver this. Not a list of tools. Not a list of personality traits. A concrete outcome that the team can recognize.
That sentence forces clarity. It separates what must be true on day one from what can be learned quickly with real support. It turns the role into a bet with rules.
Then the company hires for slope, not sameness.
Slope is not mystical. It shows up in patterns: how someone learns, how they make tradeoffs, how they communicate under pressure, how they handle ambiguity without freezing. You can see slope in past work even when the context isn’t identical.
The irony is that when companies hire for slope and get serious about onboarding, they often discover what the purple squirrel was hiding. The role itself needed design. The system needed cleanup. The team needed clarity. The vacancy was only part of the pain.
None of this is a moral failing. Most managers are not foolish. They are overloaded. Many organizations demand perfect outcomes while offering limited support, then punish leaders for being wrong. In that environment, checklist thinking spreads because it feels protective.
The purple squirrel survives because it protects. But protection is not always good.
A company that wants speed, resilience, and original work needs a different relationship with uncertainty. It needs to accept that hiring is not procurement. It is partnership. You are not buying a finished product. You are placing a bet on a person, then building an environment where that bet has a fair chance to pay off.
If you’re reading this as a candidate, there’s a parallel lesson. Some companies will always hire by checklist. You can’t talk them out of it. You can only decide whether you want to live inside that worldview. Instead of trying to look perfect on paper, try to look legible. Show what you built. Show how you think. Show what you did when things broke. A checklist can’t capture that, but a good leader can.
The purple squirrel is a small myth with large consequences. It appears when organizations confuse similarity with safety, and then pretend the future will look like the past if they hire hard enough. It won’t.
The future punishes imitation. It rewards learning. And the companies that learn fastest are rarely the ones with the longest lists. Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.