Stop Hunting Unicorns. Start Hiring Winners

Finding the perfect employee - that elusive 'unicorn' - has always been a universal struggle for every company, at every level of the org chart. And despite the proliferation of job platforms, professional networks, and recruitment agencies, the challenge is as alive today as it ever was.

There are at least two reasons for this.

• Let's be honest — in their desire to manage the give-and-take balance, employers aren't exactly operating on a different wavelength from the rest of us. We often aim to get more than we give. Maximum value, minimum spend. Whether that's time, money, or energy, we're all out here trying to optimize the equation. Employers? Same deal: they want to squeeze every last drop of value out of whatever salary and benefits package they're putting on the table. The problem is, the candidates who would actually tick all their boxes? They've run the same math — and they want to be compensated accordingly. Funny how that works. (Hi again, the give-and-take paradox. Miss us?)

• And let's talk about the job posting for a second — because employers have truly outdone themselves. The candidate profile reads like a wish-list written at 2am: every possible quality, including ones that actively contradict each other. Strategic visionary and detail-oriented perfectionist? In the same human? The bar for virtually any role, at any level, ends up looking a little something like this: 

And sometimes, like this:

And so, recruiters are left doing the impossible — scouring the market for a creature that simply does not exist. Frustrating for recruiters, wasteful for employers, and demoralizing for candidates who never really had a shot.

So how do you actually fix this? By chasing the best-fit candidate instead of the unicorn. 

It comes down to three things:

• Write a candidate profile that's grounded in reality: one that genuinely reflects the job description and the actual day-to-day of the role. Stretching the bar by 10-15% to find someone with growth potential? Totally valid. Turning a real job into a fantasy quest? Not the move.
• Be ruthlessly clear about what's truly non-negotiable versus what would just be nice to have. 
• Figure out upfront how you'll actually assess candidates against those requirements — and with which tools."

A candidate profile typically covers five areas: education, experience, hard skills, competencies (soft skills), and values. The weighting across all five shifts depending on the role — the more senior the position, the more experience, competencies, and values drive the evaluation. The more defined and task-focused the role, the more hard skills and technical knowledge take center stage.

Let’s work through all three steps using a Pharmacy Technician position as our example.

So, Step 1 — building the job profile. We take the Pharmacy Technician job description, review the list of duties, areas, and level of responsibility, and start articulating what the candidate needs to know, be able to do, and be like in order to perform the job effectively. To keep things clear and visual, here’s a useful table to fill in:

We’ve ended up with a long list of requirements for our ideal candidate — and that’s perfectly fine. It means we’re trying to capture all the parameters that matter, everything the candidate needs to be as effective and valuable as possible in this role. But reality, as always, has other ideas. Candidates who tick every box know their worth — and their salary expectations will reflect it. Or they've simply outgrown this level of role and have no intention of coming back to it, regardless of the money. Or - the classic - there just aren't any such candidates on the market right now, and the vacancy needed to be filled yesterday.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Step 2: sorting requirements into required (MUST) and preferred (WANT).

Required criteria are non-negotiable. These are the things without which the candidate simply cannot do the job, no matter how impressive they are in every other way. A truck driver without a commercial driving license (Class C) isn't a truck driver — full stop. And a surgeon, however talented, proactive, and generally brilliant, will never be allowed near an operating table without a medical degree, a completed residency, and required number of real hours logged in the operating room. No amount of charm, drive, or 'culture fit' changes that.

Everything else falls into the 'preferred' category. These are the additional qualities we'd love to see in a candidate, on top of the must-haves. The more of them a candidate brings to the table, the higher the likelihood they'll excel in the role — and the closer they get to that 'ideal' employee we've been chasing since paragraph one.

That said, to avoid wasting time and company resources chasing mythical perfect candidates, we need to go through every requirement in our job profile table and honestly ask: which of these are truly non-negotiable — legally required (as with the surgeon) or simply impossible to work around for any meaningful length of time — and which ones could we either manage without, or address through additional training? We go through each criterion and fill in the table. The key discipline here: must-have criteria should be genuinely non-negotiable. As a rule, for entry-level roles, up to six items is plenty.

This kind of prioritization dramatically improves recruiter efficiency, as it lets them focus on what actually matters when screening résumés and running first-round interviews. It also makes it possible to find candidates who, with a modest investment of training and onboarding, will quickly get up to speed and, crucially, stay in the role for a reasonable length of time. Because a candidate who looks 'perfect' on paper has often already outgrown the position and won't be motivated to give it their all, or stick around for long.

Now that we have a profile and have prioritized its requirements, we can move on to Step 3 — choosing the tools to assess candidates against those requirements. The choice of tools follows directly from the requirements themselves.

The more requirements fall under 'Education, Knowledge, and Skills,' the easier they are to verify — because these are hard skills, and hard skills have measurable outputs. Education and additional training are straightforward: diplomas and certificates either exist or they don't. Computer program skills are tested directly — give the candidate a task in a relevant application (Word, Excel, QuickBooks, etc.) and evaluate the result on the spot. If the candidate has no work experience, standardized tests can reveal their numerical and analytical potential. To gauge market knowledge or business understanding — and to see how someone actually thinks — give them a case study (real situations from your own company work particularly well) and observe their reasoning process. To assess customer interaction skills, run a brief role play and watch how they engage: do they follow a structured approach or just wing it?"

When many of the requirements fall in the area of competencies (soft skills, or behavioral patterns — a combination of personal qualities, innate abilities, character traits, and upbringing) and values, tests and case studies won't be enough. They can reveal what a candidate knows and how they think, but they can never tell you whether the person will actually act on it, how motivated they are to do so, or whether they have the necessary underlying qualities. For that, you need a combination of professional and motivational questionnaires paired with structured, competency-based interviews. And for those interviews to work properly, some prior experience is highly desirable — the whole method relies on asking about real completed projects and real past situations. If the candidate has no work history, ask them to draw on situations from student life or other contexts where they had the chance to demonstrate the competency you're assessing. If no such situations ever arose, it simply means that particular competency cannot be meaningfully evaluated.

A word on work experience. For most roles, especially expert-level positions and middle or senior management, experience is undoubtedly a must-have. That said, there are plenty of entry-level roles, including Pharmacy Technician, where experience matters less, particularly if that experience was negative or gained at a company with low standards, or none at all. For many types of work, training someone from scratch is far easier than un-training bad habits. So, for every role, it's worth asking: what kind of experience do we actually need — and do we need any at all? And if experience does matter, always verify how successful it was. Years in a job title are no guarantee of quality or expertise.

What to compromise on when setting priorities is ultimately the employer's call. But two things are worth remembering. First, giving an employee knowledge — teaching them about a product, how to set up displays, how to use accounting software — is far easier and faster than developing abilities or competencies. Second, it's always better to hire someone who falls slightly short of the requirements and invest in their development, than to bring on someone who has already outgrown the role, because the latter is far harder to manage, motivate, and keep performing at the level the job demands. And more often than not, they'll be gone before you've had a chance to see any real return on that hire.

The candidate profile for an open role should be developed and owned exclusively by the direct hiring manager (or their manager), with HR support as needed. No one knows better than the manager which tasks are most pressing right now, what the team dynamics are like and what kind of person will fit in naturally, what the new hire will need to focus on, what processes are already in place, and what learning opportunities exist through more experienced colleagues. At different stages of a company's growth, the requirements for the same role — same title, same job description — may look quite different. And that's perfectly fine. I'd even say it's the right approach, given that circumstances change. The differences won't be radical, but they'll help recruiters and managers building their teams stay sharply focused on finding their “right” candidate.