Why Hiring a Unicorn Didn’t Come With a Fairytale Ending 

A client asks us for a unicorn.  We go looking. We come back with three finalists who might as well be a racehorse, a narwhal, and a beaver. 

There’s always a flicker of disappointment. They wanted magic. We brought livestock and a marine mammal. 

Here’s what nobody says out loud when writing the brief: the unicorn was never coming. Nobody’s was. And yet the search gets scored as a disappointment anyway, because the client is comparing three real, hireable people against a fourth candidate who was never going to walk through the door. 

Recruiters have a word for what clients are actually asking for. It’s called a purple squirrel: a candidate whose education, experience, and skill set match a job posting so exactly that finding one is about as likely as finding an actual squirrel with purple fur. Here’s the part most hiring managers get wrong about that comparison: it doesn’t mean the perfect candidate is a myth. It means the myth was drawn from a real animal, and everyone forgot to go looking for the animal. 

That last part matters. A lot. 

Every Myth Started With a Real Animal 

Here’s the detail that makes this whole metaphor collapse in the best possible way: the unicorn myth already has a narwhal in it. 

For centuries, European traders sold narwhal tusks to royalty as unicorn horns, claiming they had the power to detect poison and cure sickness. Queen Elizabeth I reportedly received one worth the price of a castle. Nobody in medieval Europe ever caught an actual unicorn, because there was never a unicorn to catch. There was only ever an unusual whale with a nine-foot tooth, sold at an unusual markup, to buyers who badly wanted to believe in something rarer than what was actually in front of them. 

That’s not a fun historical footnote. It’s the whole hiring problem, six centuries early. The mythical creature always turns out to be a real one, wearing a story someone else told about it. 

The perfect candidate isn’t a myth. The myth was always describing a real candidate nobody had priced correctly. 

The Job Description Was Never Describing a Person 

Purple squirrel hunting has a real history in recruiting, and it isn’t flattering. The term surfaced in the early 2000s, right as the dot-com talent crunch had companies stacking every skill they could imagine onto a single req. Two decades later, the habit never left: job descriptions still routinely combine two or three roles’ worth of requirements into one listing, then everyone wonders why the applicant pool is empty. A single posting asks for deep technical fluency, several years of people leadership, budget ownership, and a personality flexible enough to charm a board and a factory floor in the same afternoon. Any one of those is a reasonable ask. Stacked on top of each other, they describe a person who would be running the company, not applying to work at it. 

The market has started correcting for this, whether hiring managers asked it to or not. Employers are quietly walking back the wish list. NACE’s 2026 Job Outlook survey found 70 percent of employers now use skills-based hiring, up from 65 percent the year before, and GPA screening, once used by nearly three-quarters of employers, has dropped to 42 percent. Indeed’s own hiring data confirms the trend: fewer than a third of U.S. job postings now specify a required number of years of experience at all, down from almost 40 percent just two years earlier. 

Translation: even the market is admitting the purple squirrel was a bad ask. The rest of us are catching up. 

The fix isn’t a shorter wish list. It’s a different kind of document. Instead of a page of requirements, define what success actually looks like at 90 days, 180 days, and a year in, along with the real business reason the seat exists and the problem it’s meant to solve. That’s the difference between screening for a checklist and screening for an outcome. 

We build that document for every search: a Performance Profile. It replaces the requirements list with a measurable target: what this person needs to have accomplished by each milestone, and why the company needs it solved at all. A candidate gets measured against what they’d actually need to deliver, not against a résumé that happens to resemble the last person who held the title. 

A job description built on a wish list isn’t a filter. It’s a form letter to a creature that doesn’t exist. 

An A-Player Doesn’t Always Look Like the Job Description 

This is the whole idea behind how we build a search: the goal was never to find someone flawless on a single dimension. It’s to find the right person for the right seat, and that takes three things lining up at once, not one. We call them the Briefcase, the Head, and the Heart: the skills and track record on the résumé, how someone actually thinks and solves problems, and whether their motivation genuinely lines up with what the role demands. 

The résumé and job description cover the Briefcase, and that part matters as much as it ever did. It’s also the part every purple squirrel posting already over-indexes on. A Florida State University-led review of 81 separate studies on hiring outcomes, published in Harvard Business Review, found no meaningful link between how much prior experience a candidate had and how well they performed once hired, even when that experience came from a highly similar role. A packed briefcase tells you someone has done things. It doesn’t tell you whether they’ll do this thing, here, well. 

That’s why we run a Predictive Index behavioral assessment alongside the résumé and job description on every search, not instead of them. PI covers the Head — how someone makes decisions, handles risk, and responds to structure — and maps that pattern against what a specific role actually rewards. Conversations grounded in the role itself surface the Heart: whether the motivation behind the résumé actually points at this seat. A candidate who’d be a mediocre fit for one seat can be exactly right for a different one once all three line up, and no single input on its own — not the résumé, not the assessment — tells you that. 

Skill, behavior, and motivation are the load-bearing walls of a hire. A résumé alone is just the blueprint for one of the three. 

The Racehorse, the Narwhal, and the Beaver 

A few months ago we ran a search where the client wanted, in so many words, a unicorn. What we had were three finalists who, on paper, all missed the mark in a different direction. For the sake of telling the story, we gave them nicknames — not because people are animals, but because each one matched the shape of a different one entirely. 

The first, we called the racehorse: a proven top performer with a track record of winning, built for speed and pressure, but without the exact tool-by-tool experience the posting listed. 

The second was the narwhal: a candidate with one deep, unusual, genuinely rare skill set — precisely the kind of niche expertise the client swore didn’t exist — wrapped in a personality that didn’t match the picture the client had conjured up of “the type.” 

The third was the beaver: less seasoned, hungrier, the kind of person who has quietly built something out of nothing before and clearly wanted to do it again, but with a resume thinner than the other two. 

None of them matched the unicorn on the job description. All three held up once skill, behavior, and motivation gotweighed together instead of measured against a checklist. 

The animal in front of you is real. The unicorn in your head was only ever a rumor about that animal. 

The client’s first instinct, like most clients’, was to measure all three against an imaginary fourth candidate who checked every box. That’s the wrong comparison. The right one: do this person’s skills, behavior, and motivation match what the role will actually demand once the org chart, the market, and the first ninety days do what they always do to a job description and rewrite it? 

Ask that question, and a racehorse, a narwhal, and a beaver stop looking like compromises. They start looking like three legitimate A-Players for three different seats. 

Three Questions That Separate an A-Player From a Compromise 

Not every “close, but not quite” candidate is secretly right for the seat. Some gaps really do sink a hire. The difference usually comes down to three questions, asked in this order. 

Is the gap a task or a trait? A missing certification, an unfamiliar software platform, or a skill specific to one industry can usually be closed in a matter of weeks with the right onboarding. A missing sense of ownership, a pattern of blaming others, or a behavioral mismatch with the role’s real pace cannot be trained away nearly as easily. Sort every “must-have” on the job description into one of those two buckets before you screen a single resume against it. 

What is this requirement actually protecting against, and has that risk shown up here before? Most inflated requirements exist to prevent a bad outcome from a previous hire, not because the role genuinely demands them. If the real risk was someone who couldn’t handle ambiguity, screen for that behavioral drive directly instead of proxying it with a years-of-experience number that has nothing to do with it. 

What does another six weeks of searching actually cost, compared to onboarding this person and closing the specific gap? Time-to-fill has a real price tag: lost productivity, an overworked team, and a shrinking candidate pool the longer the search drags on. Weigh that honestly against the cost of a short ramp-up plan for the one gap that’s genuinely missing. 

Run a candidate through those three questions, and a lot of “not quite right” finalists turn out to be exactly right for the seat. 

Hire the Builder, Not Just the Blueprint 

The same lens that finds an A-Player among external candidates works even better pointed inward, and most companies never point it there. LinkedIn’s own internal mobility data puts a number on it: workplaces with heavy internal mobility keep employees on staff 41 percent longer, and people who move into a new role internally end up 3.5 times more engaged than people who stay put. 

Somewhere in most organizations is a version of the beaver from the story above; someone who has already proven they can build a process from nothing, just not yet in the department currently panicking over an open req. The instinct is to post the job externally and hope a purple squirrel wanders past. The better instinct is to walk down the hall first, weigh that seat’s real skill, behavioral, and motivational requirements, and see how many of the “must-haves” turn out to be tasks someone already on payroll could pick up in a month. 

A-Players transfer across seats far more reliably than job titles do. Hiring from within isn’t a consolation prize for failing to find “real” talent externally. It’s the racehorse-and-narwhal principle, applied to people already on payroll. 

The Wrap Up 

Unicorns were never sightings. They were narwhals, dressed up by people who wanted a rarer story than the one in front of them. The purple squirrel works the same way: it’s the racehorse, the narwhal, or the beaver already sitting in the pipeline, once skill, behavior, and motivation get weighed together instead of measured against a title on a job description. 

The next time a slate of finalists all feels like “close, but not quite,” it’s worth asking whether the candidates are the problem, or the glasses are. 

Ready to Stop Hunting Unicorns? 

The purple squirrel was never hiding in some rarer forest. It was a narwhal in your own pipeline, wearing a story nobody had bothered to correct. 

At Titus Talent Strategies, we exist to help organizations find A-Players — the right person for the right seat — by weighing the whole picture: the Briefcase (skills and track record), the Head (behavioral fit, informed by the Predictive Index), and the Heart (the motivation underneath both). It’s the same three-part read behind our Hire 4 Performance® process. If your last slate of finalists all got called “close, but not quite,” let’s talk about what seat you’re actually hiring for. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What does “purple squirrel” mean in recruiting? 

It’s industry slang for a candidate who matches every single requirement in a job posting exactly, with no gaps. The comparison to an animal that doesn’t exist in nature is the point, not an accident. Most hiring managers use the term to describe a wish list they already suspect is unrealistic. 

Is a “unicorn” candidate the same thing as a “purple squirrel”? 

They’re close cousins. “Unicorn” tends to describe a broad, almost mythical ideal — someone amazing at everything — while “purple squirrel” is the more specific recruiting term for a candidate who checks every literal box on one particular job description. Either way, the underlying problem is the same: the spec describes a fantasy, not a hire. 

If the perfect candidate is basically a myth, how can Titus also say the right person for the right seat actually exists? 

The two ideas aren’t in conflict. The “perfect candidate” built from a generic wish list is a myth, the same way a horned horse is a myth. The right person for one specific seat, on the other hand, is real and findable, once the search measures behavior and fit for that seat instead of a checklist. We talk through building that kind of evaluation into a search in No Second Chances in Executive Search. 

How does the Predictive Index fit alongside the resume and job description? 

PI covers what we call the Head: it measures a person’s natural behavioral drives, then compares that pattern against a benchmarked target pattern for the specific role, team, and environment. It doesn’treplace the résumé or job description, which still cover the skills and track record we call the Briefcase — it fills in the piece neither of those can show on its own. Our breakdown of the 17 PI Reference Profiles covers how that mapping works in practice. 

Should I look internally before posting a hard-to-fill role externally? 

It’s worth checking. Internal candidates already carry proven character, behavior, and organizational context, which is exactly what’s hardest to verify from the outside. Skipping that internal look before posting externally is one of the most common mistakes in a search. 

How do I write a job description that doesn’t accidentally describe a purple squirrel? 

Separate true must-haves from nice-to-haves before you write a single line, and be honest about which requirements exist because of ego rather than necessity. We cover the language side of this problem in How Corporate Speak Is Ruining Your Job Descriptions, and build the structural fix — a Performance Profile defining success at 90, 180, and 365 days — into every search we run. 

How do I know if a candidate’s skills are actually transferable to a role they haven’t done before? 

Look at the mechanism behind the skill, not the label on it. Someone who has built a process, managed a team through change, or solved a resourcing problem from scratch has usually built a skill that travels well, even if the industry or title doesn’t match. We go deeper on evaluating this in Advancing Talent Acquisition with Skills-Based Hiring.