This is a true story, and it's not an isolated one. A candidate contacted me about a role we were working on, and he seemed to align perfectly. In hindsight, a little too perfectly. A look at his CV showed that he ticked every box - every requirement for the role.

Hands up. I'm a bit of an introvert. Yes, you'll see me doing the odd video here and there, but I REALLY HATE DOING IT. The modern world forces us to become extroverts. Or at the very least, to imitate the behaviour of extroverts.

Do you like to hire people who challenge your opinions?

I've often tried to find candidates for our clients who (and I hate this word), align. As in, there's a cultural and an almost ideological alignment on top of the necessary skills and experience.

The question is, how much non-alignment can you handle?

The two are different measures, and we tend - rather inaccurately - to measure the first question. We can look from brief to start date and create a measurement to say - oh look, our 'time to hire' is 6 weeks, 8 weeks or 8 months.

This is a puzzle I've been facing over the last couple of weeks. And these were not run-of-the-mill candidates, these were guys who had worked at some of the world's top tech companies (OK, Meta and Google), and had grown businesses many times over.

If I were truly following my passion, I'd be riding my bike around France and writing books about cycling. But it doesn't make any money, and I have a mortgage and two kids to put through, y'know, life.

What's the difference between a good candidate and an exceptional one? Sometimes, it's not necessarily the fact that they can - for instance - run some Google Ads or build a Meta Ads campaign. It's about how they apply themselves. How they react to adversity, and how they learn.

Not so long ago, I was helping run a digital agency - and our paid media guy was the bees knees. He knew it too. He'd grown our biggest account by simply being very good at his job, and his salary demands increased in line with the size of the client.

Everyone loves a bonus, right? Bonuses are good. If you're a student of languages, it's right there in the word. It's good (bon). And yet, here I am building out a recruitment agency that offers zero commission to its recruiters. What sort of madman am I?

It's always surprised me that more marketers haven't gone into recruitment or talent acquisition. After all, if we're aspiring to perfection in our role as the hybrid marketer/recruiter, then the ultimate aspiration is for talent to come inbound because our brand is so damn good.

I once had a client who was baffled that candidates didn't want to work for him. He'd put out several offers, only to be rebuffed. The more we looked into it, the more we saw there was a disconnect between what he wanted for his company, and what his candidates wanted for themselves.

There is a trend these days towards anonymising candidates, towards stripping out information that may - one way or another - bias a hiring manager. LinkedIn Recruiter can do this for sourcers and recruiters - removing photographs and names, leaving us with anonymous profiles, allegedly helping us focus on what's important.

I once asked a graphic designer when she knew her work on a specific task was finished. Her response was: When there's nothing left to take away.

How is it that one recruiter charges 10% for permanent hires, when another charges 25%? They supply the same product - people. So what is driving the price?

Did you ever wonder how that extremely pretty blonde girl on Instagram (or TikTok) managed to get 1 million followers? Or did you ever wonder how that hiring manager managed to hire a team of attractive, young twenty-something girls when there are so many other types of employee on the market?

When Wayne Rooney was 9 years old, everyone at Everton Football Club knew about him already. You see, the advantage talent scouts in football - and for that matter, music - have over talent scouts in marketing, is that you can SEE or HEAR your talent at a young age. And if you have the network of scouts that can attend junior matches all around the country, then you're going to find that talent at a very young age.

We crunched some numbers, and we found out that on average, candidates are on the market for just eight weeks.

No worries! All the best! Happy Monday. There's a certain movement against all of the niceties that we use to populate our communication these days.