The pattern we see, week after week
A founder writes a job description for a "Senior Backend Engineer." The JD asks for 8+ years experience, deep Go expertise, distributed systems at scale, payment infra background, and a target comp of ₹65 LPA. The founder believes this is reasonable. The recruiter believes this is reasonable. The hiring manager has signed off. Three weeks in, the search is stuck.
The problem is not effort. The recruiter has approached 180 profiles. The problem is that the role described — at that comp — does not exist in the volume the search assumes. The market for that exact profile in Bangalore is somewhere between 80 and 140 people total. Maybe 12-15 are open to a conversation in any given month. And the compensation anchor is ₹20 LPA below what most of them are currently making.
Three signals the brief is wrong
The three diagnostic questions we ask before any search starts:
| Question | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| What is the total addressable pool for this exact profile in this city? | If the answer is under 200, you are running a sniper search. Process and patience matter more than volume. |
| What does the 60th-percentile comp look like, not the median? | Strong candidates are above median. If your offer sits at median, the strongest 40% will not engage. |
| What would make a candidate switch in the next 90 days? | If the answer is "more money," the search will not close. The candidates worth hiring rarely move for cash alone. |
What a calibrated brief looks like
The same role, calibrated: "Backend Engineer, 5-7 years experience, Go or Java production background, payments or fintech domain familiarity, comp range ₹55-72 LPA depending on stage and equity exposure." This brief identifies roughly 350-450 candidates in Bangalore. Of those, 60-80 are open in a 90-day window. The math works.
The shift from the original brief is not lower standards. It is honest market reading. The original brief assumed a market that does not exist. The calibrated brief works with the market that does.
The cost of skipping calibration
Searches that skip calibration take 4-6 months to close, on average. Searches that calibrate first close in 6-10 weeks. The cost of calibration is one structured 90-minute conversation with the hiring committee. The cost of skipping it is two extra months of empty seat and roughly 15-20 wasted candidate interviews.
The brief is the deliverable that determines whether a search succeeds. It comes before sourcing. It is the work that the strongest search firms do first, and the work the weakest firms skip entirely.
