The real reason you can't find good people

You can't find good employees. You've said it at dinner, you've said it to your spouse, you've probably said it to a candidate who didn't show up for the second interview. Nobody wants to work anymore. The good ones are all taken. You post the job, you get a pile of applicants who couldn't spell the company name, and you hire the least bad one because the work is piling up on your desk. Then you post again six months later.

The myth that lets you off the hook

Start with what's true. Hiring is hard right now. You do get junk applicants. People ghost. Some of them really don't want the job they applied for, and you've met them.

But look at what the myth does for you. If the good people are gone, there's nothing to fix. It's the weather. You can complain about it and keep doing exactly what you're doing, and nobody, including you, can blame you for the results.

The good people aren't gone. They're working. They're showing up somewhere else every morning, for somebody who could tell them what the job was. The capable plumber, the sharp office manager, the estimator who's never late with a number, all still out there, all employed, and none of them saw your post and thought, that one.

There's no shortage of good people. There's a shortage of jobs they can see.

You can't find good employees because you can't describe one

Ask yourself what good means in your business. Not on the post. In your head.

You'll get something like this. Someone who just gets it. Takes initiative. Doesn't need hand-holding. Cares about the work. Shows up. That sounds like a description, and it isn't one. Every person who's ever filled out an application believes all of that about themselves. You've written a horoscope and you're surprised everybody thinks it's about them.

What you actually mean by good is closer to this. Someone who'll do the job the way you'd do it, without you explaining how you'd do it. You're looking for a copy of yourself who'll work for a wage and never ask a question. That person doesn't exist, and if they did, they'd be running their own shop.

So you go hunting for a feeling. You'll know it when you see it. And the trouble with know it when you see it is that you only find out after they're hired, which is the most expensive possible moment to find out anything.

You can't find what you can't describe.

Good people are interviewing you too

The candidate you'd actually want is running a test on you the whole time you're running one on them.

They ask what success looks like after ninety days. You say you'll figure it out together. They ask who they'd report to. You say everybody kind of reports to you, it's a small team, it's like a family. They ask what decisions would be theirs. You laugh a little and say it depends.

You heard yourself being flexible. They heard nobody knows what this job is. A strong candidate has options, and options mean they don't have to take a job with no edges. So they're polite, they thank you for your time, and they take the offer from the company that could answer the question.

Watch what that leaves you with. The people who stay in your process are the ones who couldn't afford to walk away from a vague answer. Not bad people. Just people with fewer offers. Your hiring doesn't fail to attract good candidates. It quietly filters them out, and you only ever meet the ones who were left.

Your interview isn't a screen. It's a sieve with the holes in the wrong place.

What the empty seat is really costing you

Run an example. Say the seat stays open for sixteen weeks, and the work behind it lands on you at fifteen hours a week. That's 240 hours. Six full forty-hour weeks of your year, spent doing a job you were trying to pay someone else to do.

And those aren't neutral hours. They're hours you didn't spend selling, pricing, or fixing the thing that's actually broken. The seat's empty, so you fill it, so you're too buried to define the seat, so it stays empty. The engine's misfiring and you're the one cranking it by hand.

Then the hire you finally make, the least bad one, comes in to a job nobody wrote down. Maybe it works. If it doesn't, you're back at week one with the post, the pile and the dinner-table complaint, and the sixteen weeks start again.

The vacancy isn't the cost. The loop is.

Why posting harder makes it worse

The instinct is to push. More job boards. A bigger ad budget. Raise the pay. Hire a recruiter. Every one of those feels like taking the problem seriously.

But every one of them amplifies the same blurry signal. More boards means more people reading a post that doesn't say what the job is. Higher pay means more applicants for a job nobody can describe, which is a bigger pile, not a better one. And a recruiter can't find what you can't describe either. You'll just be paying someone else to guess what you meant.

It's like turning up the volume on a radio that's between stations. Louder static is still static.

A hire never comes out sharper than the sentence that described the seat. Spend all you want on reach. The definition is the ceiling.

You can't advertise your way past a blank.

Finish one sentence before your next post

Take the role you're trying to fill and finish this sentence out loud. Ninety days after this person starts, they'll have done this, and I'll know because of that. With a number in it. With a date.

Not "they'll be up to speed." Not "they'll own the front desk." Something you could point at. A count, a dollar figure, a thing that either happened or didn't.

Then try a second one. If a stranger read your post, could they tell what a great week in this job looks like, and what a bad one looks like? If they couldn't, a good candidate couldn't either, and a good candidate has somewhere better to be than guessing.

If you can't finish either sentence, the market isn't the problem. You just found the blank.

A seat a stranger could describe

Good people don't respond to a hunt. They respond to a target. No job board or magic interview question gets you there. What does is a seat that's defined before anyone sits in it, clear enough that a stranger could tell what winning in it looks like.

It's a load-bearing wall you put up before you hang a picture on it. And once it's in, two things change. The strong candidates stop filtering themselves out, because the job finally has edges they can see. And you stop hiring on a feeling, because you finally have something to measure the feeling against.

Good people were never a matter of luck. You're not unlucky. You've been fishing with no bait and blaming the lake.

There's no shortage of good people. Build a seat they can see, and you'll find out how many were there the whole time.