“Sure, I Could Do That!” The Fantasy World of Amateur Executive Search
The rise of unqualified recruiters is breaking hiring. Learn why your hiring pipeline is run by amateurs and what real talent work should look like.
Hiring has become a stage show where everyone calls themselves a ringmaster. You’ve got:
Ex-operators reinventing themselves as talent consultants,
Founders who once hired two interns now claiming “deep search experience,” and
Procurement leads choosing recruiters the way you’d choose office snacks.
Imagine handing your company’s future to someone whose primary qualification is “gut” and a LinkedIn account. It’s not hypothetical. It’s happening. All the time. The absurdity doesn’t stop with the self-anointed talent whisperers. What’s truly baffling is that real companies, with real budgets and real consequences, agree to this.
In what other domain would this fly? You wouldn’t hire Dave from the pub as a brain surgeon because he once watched a documentary on the NHS. Yet, when it comes to building the executive team, suddenly everyone’s a qualified assessor of leadership capability. The logic breaks down immediately, but for some reason hiring has become the exception and is treated more like a community hobby.
Hiring has become the domain of the unvetted and the overconfident. And everyone’s pretending that’s totally normal.
The Rise of the Accidental Recruiter: “Couldn’t Get a Job, So Now I Help Others”
Enter the accidental recruiter: a figure now so common in the talent ecosystem that it’s almost a genre.
Not a trained recruiter.
Not an IO psychologist.
Not even someone who could land the job they’re now claiming to help others fill.
These are the people who, after being laid off, rebranded themselves on LinkedIn as “strategic talent advisors” within 36 hours. No qualifications required. Just a few vague testimonials and the gall to sell their new persona.
Their credentials usually amount to “built a few teams,” which upon closer inspection, means hiring a couple of juniors in a startup that ran out of money within 18 months. They now preach “human-first hiring” and post daily quotes about empathy, while sending out badly-formatted candidate spreadsheets.
What’s especially frustrating is that they believe they’re experts. And not just experts, but thought leaders. That’s where the psychology bites. It’s classic Dunning-Kruger: the less they understand about effective hiring, the more certain they are that it’s easy. These are people who believe structured interviews are oppressive and that competency models kill “culture.” They trust their gut because it’s the only thing they’ve got.
They operate without structured methods, without calibrated data, and without an understanding of market dynamics. Their “process” is a series of hunches. All confidence, no competence and a slightly unsettling tendency to call themselves “people-first.”
How Did We Get Here? HR, Leadership, and Chronically Low Standards
The real question isn’t why unqualified people are trying to sell hiring services. People try all sorts of things. The more worrying bit is why anyone buys it. Why do smart companies, often with millions in funding and entire teams of functional experts, toss hiring responsibilities to someone who once ran a hiring process for a coffee startup and hasn’t once made a senior hire?
The culprits? Founders, execs, and HR teams who seem perfectly rational in every other area of business, but when it comes to hiring, suddenly make decisions based on a warm intro and a friendly tone.
It doesn’t happen in other domains:
You don’t let your cousin file your IPO paperwork because he once played Monopoly.
You don’t let a graphic designer manage your payroll.
You don’t let your CFO run your ad campaigns (well... actually… never mind, bad example).
There are reasons for this mess. Hiring is noisy. Feedback is delayed. A bad hire often just slowly corrodes team performance until nobody remembers when things worked properly. That makes it hard to detect vendor quality. Add in our very human tendency to confuse confidence with competence and you’ve got a perfect recipe for trusting the wrong people.
On top of that, there’s the social dynamic: people like working with people they already know. Homophily is the silent killer of rigor. Why vet a professional when your ex-colleague’s mate is “starting a little search thing”?
And of course, there’s price. When procurement leads the process, outcomes rarely do.
DIY Doesn’t Mean “Do It Wrong”: Why Hiring For Yourself ≠ Hiring For Others
Hiring someone for your own team is not the same as conducting external search. It’s barely even the same sport. And yet, we’re surrounded by a growing crowd of people who assume that because they once posted a job ad and interviewed two humans, they now understand how to navigate an open market, qualify top talent, and close a high-stakes search with precision.
Hiring internally benefits from every possible shortcut.
You’re backed by your brand,
You’ve got implicit trust,
You already understand the role because you probably wrote it yourself,
Your candidate pool is self-selecting.
It’s a different game when people are already familiar with your company, your values, and your product. They’re predisposed to be interested.
External search is the opposite. It’s cold. It’s competitive. It requires methodical research, targeted outreach, and the kind of structured assessment frameworks that don’t exist when you’re hiring your co-founder’s cousin. You’re balancing tradeoffs in location, compensation, readiness, and risk. You’re persuading people with other offers, higher salaries, and better poker faces.
It takes a real strategy:
Deep market mapping.
Competitive comp strategy.
Structured assessment frameworks.
Iron-clad close plans.
This is not a hobby. It’s not a part-time gig you pick up after a failed startup. It is a discipline, and when done well, it’s part science, part operations, and part psychology.
So, by all means hire for your own team. But let’s stop pretending that this qualifies you to sell hiring as a professional service to others. It’s a whole other job.
What Professional Hiring Actually Looks Like (In Case Anyone Forgot)
In a world where anyone can call themselves a recruiter, it’s easy to forget what real hiring craft actually looks like. This isn’t about finding warm bodies. It’s about systematically reducing the risk of a bad hire while maximizing signal, speed, and candidate experience. It’s a job. A hard one. And it requires expertise.
Here’s what real professionals do:
Competency modeling: defining the actual capabilities a role requires and mapping those to observable behaviors. No one writes “can navigate ambiguous strategic tradeoffs across functions” on an email and hopes for the best. Real practitioners do the work.
Structured assessments: every candidate is evaluated using the same questions, the same rubric, the same scoring framework. Not “let’s chat and see how it goes.”
Measurement: professionals track funnel metrics that mean something: pass-through rates, time-to-offer, submittal-to-hire ratios, ramp performance. Not how many résumés someone slung into your inbox at 2am.
Talent intelligence: salary data, competitor activity, market movement. They explain what tradeoffs you’re making by hiring in Jakarta versus Singapore. They don’t guess.
Closing: pros don’t just throw out an offer and cross their fingers. They run pre-close processes. They identify blockers early. They stage decision points with precision. You don’t lose great candidates because “we thought she was all-in.”
Calibration: tight feedback loops, debriefs, signal audits. consistency checks. If your team can’t agree on what “strong hire” means, a pro will make sure you do.
This level of work isn’t delivered by someone whose most recent placement was their high-school classmate. It comes from people who treat hiring as an operating function.
Not everyone who isn’t a recruiter is clueless about hiring. Some former operators genuinely develop the craft. A few founders take it seriously and get very good. That’s fine. But those are the exceptions. The rest? A revolving door of hopefuls, hobbyists, and half-qualified consultants playing dress-up with one of your most important business functions.
This idea that “anyone who has hired someone before can now run external search” is corporate self-harm. At worst, it’s delusional. At best, it’s naïve.
Hiring drives growth, culture, product, and retention. It is not something you casually outsource to the person with the cheapest rate card. And it’s definitely not something you give to someone who couldn’t get hired themselves.
So the next time you’re evaluating someone to lead your hiring efforts, ask a better question. Would you trust them with your investor relations? Your legal risk?
If the answer is no, it should also be no when it comes to hiring your VP of Corporate Finance.
Mediocrity wrapped in likability is still mediocrity. You don’t need a friend. You need a professional. Choose accordingly.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we advise leadership teams on turning talent acquisition into a competitive advantage. Contact us if you’re interested in structured, repeatable, high-signal hiring processes that actually work.