How we find the people who "aren't on the market"

"We need someone at the intersection of two rare skills. We have been looking for six months — it seems they just do not exist." I hear this regularly, and almost always the problem is not that the people are not there. It is that they are being looked for in the wrong place and counted the wrong way. Truly rare roles call for turning the usual search logic inside out — and then, instead of emptiness, a living market appears.

Why "not on the market" is a conclusion about the tool, not about people

When a role is common, the market is visible at once: dozens of vacancies, hundreds of applications, clear salary expectations. When a role is rare — at the intersection of two fields, with an unusual combination of experience — that picture is missing. Two or three vacancies are open in the whole country, salaries are not stated in them, statistics are zero. That is where the feeling "there are none" grows from. But the absence of vacancies tells you how few companies know how to describe and close such a role, not how many people are able to do it.

The reverse range: reading the market from the candidate side, not from vacancies

The usual analysis goes from vacancies: you look at what employers offer and derive a range. For a rare role this is a dead end — there is almost no one to offer it to. We turn the approach around and read the market from people: not "what companies ask for" but "who is even out there and what the specialist themselves expects". A CV is a candidate's stated expectations, and there turn out to be orders of magnitude more of them than vacancies. Where three vacancies are open, hundreds of suitable CVs may be lying.

A case: the role that "did not exist"

A client came to us for a specialist at the intersection of drone operation and low-level development — a narrow combination, new to the market. Before us it had been searched the usual way, by job title, and only a handful of candidates were found. We came in from the supply side: we gathered the synonyms of the role by which people describe themselves (and they describe themselves differently — someone through hardware, someone through operation, someone through a specific technology), and filtered by the substance of the experience rather than an exact word match. More than a thousand relevant CVs ended up in the work instead of a handful. The role that "did not exist" turned into an ordinary sourcing task.

Where the usual estimate goes wrong: geography and expectations

Rare roles have a second trap — money. When the range is guessed "by eye", people take the Moscow bar and apply it to everyone. But specialists' expectations in the capital and in the regions diverge noticeably, and for a vacancy in the regions the Moscow yardstick inflates both the budget and the picture of the role. When the market is assembled from real CVs for the right geography, the true spread of expectations becomes visible — and the company stops overpaying for a myth and under-collecting responses because of a wrong bar. (We do not publish specific figures — that is part of the work for a specific task.)

What this gives the hiring side

Instead of the answer "there are none", the company gets two things: a real pool of people it can show and invite, and an honest range of expectations for the right region and level. After that comes the usual work: the role profile, conversations with candidates, assessment. Rarity stops being a verdict; it becomes a question of method.

The bottom line

"There is no one like that on the market" almost always means "we searched by job title, where people call themselves something else". Turn the optics from vacancies to people — and the rare role gets closed. If you have a position that "will not fill" for months, write to us: we will look at whether there is actually a market for it.