I want to walk through a job posting I saw recently. I'm not naming the company — this isn't about embarrassing anyone. It's a pattern I see constantly, across IT, engineering, and professional services roles alike.
The role: mid-level project manager in a professional services firm.
The requirements: 7–10 years of project management experience. PMP certified. Proficiency in six specific software platforms. Experience across four distinct industries. Demonstrated leadership of teams of 10+. A track record managing budgets over $5M. Bilingual preferred. "Startup mentality" combined with "enterprise experience."
The starting salary: $72,000.
The Purple Unicorn Problem
I call this the Purple Unicorn problem. The job description was built by committee, with every stakeholder adding the one thing they personally wish the last person in the role had known. Nobody went back and asked the question that actually matters: what does this person need to be able to do on day one to succeed?
The result is a requirements list describing a candidate who either doesn't exist, or who — if they do exist — is already making $140,000 somewhere else and has no reason to consider $72,000.
Why the Role Sits Open for Months
Here's what happens next, almost every time. The role sits open for four months. The hiring manager concludes the talent market is impossible.
The talent market isn't impossible. The job description is.
Every additional "nice to have" bolted onto a posting narrows the pool of people who'll even apply — and it does that before you've had a chance to evaluate anyone's actual fit. You're filtering out qualified candidates on paper, before a human ever talks to them.
The Fix Isn't Complicated — But It Requires a Real Conversation
Fixing this doesn't require new sourcing tools or a bigger budget. It requires going back to the requirements list and asking three questions, out loud, with everyone who contributed to it in the room:
- What are the three or four things this person absolutely must be able to do in the first 90 days?
- What can reasonably be learned on the job?
- What's genuinely required versus what's just nice to have?
Trim the list to what's real. Pay what the role is actually worth in today's market. And you'll see your qualified candidate pool expand — often dramatically — without lowering your standards at all. You're not settling for less; you're finally describing what you actually need.
Where This Shows Up Most
This is especially common in growing small businesses and mid-sized firms where a job description gets written once, then copy-pasted and lightly edited every time the role reopens — accumulating requirements from three or four hiring cycles without anyone re-evaluating whether they still apply.
If your last search for a role took twice as long as you expected, it might be worth a fresh look at what's actually on the page.
Building job descriptions that attract the right candidates — not just a long list of requirements — is one of the most common gaps we help small and midsized businesses fix. See how we approach job description development →