“Good, but not quite right”: what repeated near-misses are telling you
When every candidate falls short in a different way, the brief is usually what's missing.
By Macro Merge · · 5 min read
The short version
- 1If every candidate misses in a different way, the role isn't defined yet. If they all miss in the same way, it's the market or the budget.
- 2Write down the one-line reason for each rejection, put them in one table and read them together. It takes 30 minutes.
- 3Agree the rewritten brief with everyone who interviews before you meet another candidate.
Six weeks. Nine candidates. Nine different reasons for saying no.
If this sounds familiar, the instinct is to widen the search: more profiles, another agency, a job post on a different platform. Usually that makes it worse. More candidates just means more reasons to say no.
The more useful move is to stop and look at the reasons you already have. Rejection reasons are data. Read together, they tell you whether the problem is the brief, the budget or the market, and each of those has a different fix.
The 30-minute exercise
Take your last five to eight candidates who reached at least a second conversation, and the honest reason each one didn't go further. Not the polite version you sent the candidate. The real one, in one line, from each person who interviewed them.
Put them all in one place:
| Candidate | Who interviewed | Reason, in one line | Pattern |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Founder, CTO | Too execution-focused. Wants a roadmap handed to them. | |
| B | Founder | Too strategic. Will they actually write the tickets? | |
| C | CTO | Strong, but no B2B experience. | |
| D | Founder, CTO | Founder liked them. CTO didn't, and couldn't say why. | |
| E | Founder | Good, just not quite right. |
Then read the reasons as a set, and fill in the last column. Almost every set falls into one or more of four patterns.
Four patterns, and what each one means
1. The reasons contradict each other
“Too senior” for one candidate, “not senior enough” for the next. “Too hands-on”, then “not hands-on enough”.
This is the clearest signal there is. Nobody has decided what the role is, so each candidate is being measured against a different imaginary person. Often the role is really two roles, and you're hoping one person can be both.
The fix: decide. Write down which version of the role you need for the next 12 months, and what you'll give up to get it.
2. Interviewers disagree about the same person
The founder loved them and the CTO didn't. Or everyone liked the candidate, for completely different reasons.
That isn't a candidate problem. It means there's no shared brief, so each interviewer is quietly testing their own idea of the job. The candidate can't win, because they're sitting three different exams.
The fix: before the next interview, get everyone who interviews into a room for 20 minutes and agree the three things that matter most. Write them down. Each interviewer then owns one of them.
3. The same reason every time
“Not hands-on enough.” Five times in a row.
This has two possible meanings, and it's worth being honest about which applies. Either it's a must-have nobody wrote down, so the search keeps bringing the wrong people. Or it's genuinely scarce at your budget, location or stage, and the market is telling you so.
The fix: if it was unstated, state it, and make it the first thing every screening call checks. If it's scarce, you have a real trade-off to make: pay more, accept a longer search, or change what you're asking for.
4. “Just a feeling”
“Something was off.” “Not sure they'd fit here.”
A feeling isn't useless. It usually points at something real about your stage or way of working that hasn't been put into words. The risk is that “fit” quietly turns into “like us”, which narrows the pool for no good reason.
The fix: for each “feeling” rejection, ask what they would have done in their first month that worried you. The answer is usually specific: “they'd want a process we don't have”, or “they'd wait to be told what to do”. That's a line for the brief, not a feeling.
Rejection reasons are data. Read them together.
Turning the rejections into a brief
Once you've named the patterns, rewrite the role from the evidence, not from the original job description.
- Rewrite the must-haves. Keep only what your rejections actually tested. If nobody was turned down for lacking something, it isn't a must-have.
- Name the trade-offs. “We'd rather have someone who has done this at a 20-person company than someone from a famous brand.” Write it down, so you can hold yourselves to it.
- Agree it with every interviewer. One page, signed off by everyone who'll meet candidates. Then each interviewer tests the part they own.
In this example, the gap was never the candidates. The founders hadn't decided what they'd hand over. “Too execution-focused” and “too strategic” were both true, because they were measuring against two different jobs. Once they decided, the search went in a different direction entirely.
When it isn't the brief
Sometimes the brief is fine and the problem is somewhere else. Worth checking honestly:
- Is the pay competitive for the profile you've described, in this market, right now? If strong candidates keep dropping out at offer stage, it may not be.
- Is the pitch working? Can every interviewer explain, in two sentences, why someone good should join you now?
- Is the process too long? Good people have options. Five rounds over four weeks loses them to faster companies.
- Are candidates leaving before you can reject them? If people withdraw after the first conversation, ask them why. They'll often tell you.
Restarting well
If you've been stuck for weeks, here's a reasonable two-week reset:
- This week: do the 30-minute exercise, rewrite the brief from it, and get every interviewer to agree it.
- Next week: look again at your two closest near-misses against the new brief, if the timing still works. Sometimes the right person was already in the pile.
- Then: restart the search with the new brief, and screen every new candidate against it before anyone spends an hour in an interview.
The goal isn't to lower the bar. It's to make sure everyone is looking at the same one.