I have a small rotation of lines I say to clients so often I’ve stopped noticing I’m saying them. They laugh, they nod, sometimes they repeat one back to me at the next meeting like an in-joke. And they are jokes, mostly. But I’ve started noticing that mine aren’t really jokes so much as compressed honesty, the short version of something that would take an uncomfortable ten minutes to say properly.
So here are five things I actually say, on a fairly regular basis, and what I’m really telling you when I say them.
“I wish I could print candidates, I’d be very rich.”
(Credit to Lexi Gibbs for this one, I stole it fair and square.)
This one comes out whenever a client is confused about why a role that “should” be easy to fill is taking three weeks longer than they’d like. Unemployment’s up. Headlines say the market favours employers. So where’s the flood of applicants?
The honest answer is that national unemployment figures and your specific skill shortage are two different conversations. NZ’s labour market right now is uneven, soft in some categories, genuinely tight in others, particularly anything technical, regulated, or requiring a specific combination of experience. You’re not hiring “a candidate.” You’re hiring one of a finite number of actual humans who exist. I can’t manufacture more of them. Believe me, I’ve checked.
“We can find you a purple unicorn, it might just take a while”
This is the line for the brief that asks for eight years’ experience in a five-year-old technology, deep industry knowledge, willingness to take a pay cut, and availability to start Monday. I’m not saying no. I’m saying: pick two of those, or pick a longer timeline.
Most “we can’t find anyone” situations aren’t market problems, they’re spec problems. The unicorn usually exists. They’re just not going to fall out of the first ten applications, and they’re definitely not doing it for what the last person got paid in 2019.
“We can’t clone the person who left”
This is the gentlest way I know to say something clients don’t always want to hear: sometimes the brief for “the new person” is actually a wishlist built entirely out of “the old person.” Every quirk that made the departing employee good at the job, the ones nobody wrote down because they didn’t need to, because that person just did them, gets quietly folded into the job description as if it’s a requirement rather than a personality trait.
The candidate who eventually gets hired into that role is never going to be a replica, and holding out for one just extends the search and sets the new hire up to be compared to a ghost from day one. The better question isn’t “who’s like Sandra” it’s “what did Sandra’s role actually need, separate from Sandra.”
“Some people suck….”
I say this most often to clients who’ve been burned once and are now treating every interview like a hostage negotiation. There’s always a story behind it, the hire who ghosted after two weeks, the “great culture fit” who turned out to be a nightmare, the one everyone still refers to by first name in the tone usually reserved for exes. One bad hire, and suddenly there are six interview rounds, three reference checks, and a gut feeling that’s actually just leftover panic from 2019.
Here’s the thing: that person probably did just suck. Not every bad hire is a symptom of a broken process, the wrong salary band, or proof you can’t trust your own judgement. Sometimes someone interviews beautifully, has a glowing CV, and still turns out to be genuinely difficult to work with, and no amount of extra process would have caught it. It happens. It’s not a pattern. It’s a Tuesday.
The risk is when one bad experience quietly rewrites the whole approach, extra rounds that exhaust good candidates, hesitation at offer stage that loses them to someone faster, a general “well, last time…” hanging over every shortlist. The lesson from a bad hire isn’t “trust nothing.” It’s “that one didn’t work out, and that’s allowed to just be true, without becoming a permanent personality trait of your hiring process.”
“Everything is going to be ok.”
Usually said around week four of a search that’s gone quiet, or the day after a candidate pulls out at offer stage. Hiring feels enormous when you’re inside it, like the business will grind to a halt if this one role stays empty another fortnight. It won’t. I’ve watched a lot of “urgent, critical, can’t-wait” roles resolve themselves into perfectly good hires a few weeks later than planned.
Recruitment has a lot of waiting built into it, and waiting is stressful. Sometimes the most useful thing I can offer isn’t a status update, it’s confirmation that the process hasn’t derailed, it’s just doing what these processes do.
None of these lines are really jokes. They’re the fast version of things I’d otherwise have to explain properly every single time.
Which one have you heard most from your own recruiter or said yourself, if you’re the one doing the hiring?
Sarah 🧡
First published in Sarah’s LinkedIn newsletter, Recruitment Rambles. Subscribe there to get each edition as it lands.
