Purple Squirrel Syndrome: The Silent Killer of Senior Hires

In executive search, we often hear the same line: 

"We’re looking for someone a bit more… unique."

What follows is usually a highly specific — and often unrealistic — wish list. A candidate who’s scaled a startup and navigated enterprise politics. Who knows payments and digital assets. Who’s commercially brilliant and deeply technical. Oh — and ideally they’ve done it all in your niche, with your tooling, and your exact team size.

This is what we call Purple Squirrel Syndrome — chasing the rarest, most impossibly perfect candidate who may not even exist.

And if you’re not careful, it can quietly derail your entire leadership hiring strategy.

The Costs of Chasing the Impossible

Hiring for senior roles is already complex. Add purple squirrel syndrome into the mix, and you multiply your risks:

• Time lost: Months go by as the bar moves and expectations shift. Critical projects stall. • Opportunity cost: Top candidates are dismissed for not checking every box — even if they have 90% of what matters most. • Internal fatigue: Your hiring panel gets frustrated. Your search partner starts spinning wheels. The market tunes out.

In the end, the “perfect” hire becomes the enemy of the great one.

Where It Comes From

Purple squirrel syndrome usually stems from a mix of:

• Fear of getting it wrong: Senior hires carry weight. Leaders want certainty — but often chase it in the wrong places.

• Unclear role definition: If the business isn’t aligned on what success looks like in the role, the profile keeps shifting.

• Over-reliance on past templates: "We want someone just like our last CRO, but with more crypto experience." That person might not exist.

How to Break the Cycle

The cure isn’t to lower the bar — it’s to clarify the brief and focus on impact.

Here’s how high-performing firms avoid purple squirrel syndrome:

1. Define success, not just the CV What does this person need to achieve in their first 12–18 months? Start there. Then reverse-engineer the capabilities needed.

2. Prioritise your must-haves Every brief should have three tiers: • Non-negotiables (core leadership traits, specific experience) • Nice-to-haves (industry familiarity, tech stack knowledge) • Trainables (internal tools, certain frameworks, etc.)

Stick to them. Ruthlessly.

3. Embrace adjacent experience Sometimes the best candidates come from outside your niche. They bring fresh thinking and hard-won lessons from parallel industries. If the values and leadership style align — don’t rule them out too quickly.

4. Partner with your search firm Executive search works best as a collaborative process. Keep communication open. Share internal context. Align early on trade-offs. When you co-own the process, the outcomes are always stronger.

What Success Looks Like

Some of our best placements came from clients who had the courage to hire someone just outside the purple squirrel profile.

They focused on potential over perfection. They chose cultural fit and leadership strength over tick-box experience. And they hired someone who grew with the role, not into it.

Senior hiring isn’t about unicorn hunting. It’s about finding the right human to lead in your unique context.

Let’s move away from the myth of the purple squirrel — and focus on real, strategic, high-impact hiring.

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