Piece of PAS - No problem, pt 1

Greg Wyatt • May 27, 2026

What follows is part 1 in a new series on problem awareness in recruitment. It's also a foundational chapter in my new book A Recruitment AiDE - out on Saturday.

The book is a discipline for attracting key hires, combining evidence, frameworks, practical steps and insight. Mainly it's who I am as a recruiter and you can see all of me in my words.

I'll share the link to the paperback when it's available.

Chapter 3 - An introduction to problem awareness

August 2023 / May 2026 (updated for the book)

As my partner and I were picking up our keys at Hertz, confident we had a good insurance policy, the counter agent presented us with a problem.

Your insurance has an excess and doesn't cover this this and this. You could pay up to £3,000 more in this this and this scenario.

'Really?'

Nervous sweat agitated our brows as we anticipated the mad tooting of the Amalfi coast roads, unaware this might even have been a problem.

Fortunately, they had a solution of paying their insurance which was more than the cost of the rental.

Nice try, mio amico. Maybe next time.

Employers could learn a great deal from this interaction, especially when considering the candidate journey.

The majority of employers and agencies approach recruitment as if a candidate's first step is to apply.

It isn't. Their first step is problem awareness.

Problem awareness isn't a new concept. The Problem Agitation Solution copywriting framework has used it for decades.

A candidate’s problem may be unemployment, an uncertain job situation, a bad boss, limited career progression or money.

These are often people who are actively looking for work and they'll see any role that solves their problem as an opportunity.

Many of these are brilliant candidates, who may contact you just because of your vacancy.

But if your adverts aren't working, who else should you be appealing to?

The problem unaware, the problem ambivalent, and those who accept a compromise.

You’ll note I haven’t mentioned the active vs passive candidate debate here. Problem awareness is a better way to look at it. One because situation does not define candidacy. Two because a passive candidate one day may suddenly become aware of the problem of impending redundancy - has their capability changed?

Many problem unaware potential candidates are caught in a combination of career inertia, Stockholm Syndrome and Region Beta Paradox.

They may well see your role as the right move for the right reason if you engage them in the right way.

But your messaging doesn't do this.

When your advertising talks about brilliant and unique opportunities, market leaders and innovation, what problems does that address?

Besides, every vacancy is these things, according to most adverts, therefore none of them are.

And if you assume a public advert is the archetype of your message, it's likely to be just as ineffective everywhere: in your DMs, phone calls, pitches, interviews, job offers.

All you need do in your messaging is address the issues and problems the most unaware of candidates have, and that message is effective for every level of problem awareness.

Put your candidate's needs first, and this informs everything you do in recruitment. In service of filling your vacancy.

It means moving from a system focused on transactions, speed and volume, to one focused on the person you need to employ.

A minor shift and one which has a fundamental impact on how you recruit, how you bring people on board, and how you retain them.

What are the problems your ideal candidate may have that your vacancy solves?

Articulate that and you'll find recruitment simpler.

I'm not saying you need to cause nervous sweat to agitate on your candidates' brows. Instead, make them think about their own situation having read or heard your words.

One way to do this is adapting the Problem Agitation Solution copywriting framework in your advertising.

Problem: insufficient insurance. Agitation: the consequence. Solution: additional insurance.

But unlike the mafiosi agents, there's no need for compulsion, simply highlighting the problems your vacancy solves.

A start-up CEO once mentioned that, in interviewing candidates, it was surprising how many were frustrated by a lack of training in their roles.

That's the candidate problem, right there.

'We invest in your future through a clear path for career development, funding the training you need' - if you can do that.

Maybe that wasn't an identified problem previously, but like any writing, once you've identified it as an attraction point, you can use it everywhere, iteratively and appropriately.

What other problems?

I think back on all those tens of thousands of conversations I've had with candidates.

'I'd love to have a bit of flexibility, even just to see my daughter's nativity play.'

We trust you to get the job done how you see fit, which means you'll always have the flexibility for the things that matter at home.

'We were hybrid, now they want us back in the office.'

'The politics here is an organ grinder.'

'I know I'm underpaid, but they don't care.'

'I've hit the ceiling of how I can progress. The FD has been here 300 years and is immortal.'

My solution to the first example above is clumsy. How would you solve these other problems?

Of course above-the-line (one to many) messaging has to be generic, to an extent. You can form an ideal candidate profile, but your ideal candidate may well be different.

So when you enter below-the-line comms (one to one), the best thing to do is to find out their situation, needs, aspirations and potential problems first. Through asking good questions, not pitching.

It's one reason I don't personalise much in my outreach. I find personalisation quite cringy, but more importantly I find it wasted space when you make the conversation solely about them.

Do that and if your opportunity meets what they need, it's far more likely to be the right move.

Problem awareness sits underneath much of the AiDE framework.

The Attention dimension depends on naming a problem a reader recognises - or one they are one honest sentence away from recognising.

The ikigai dimension depends on understanding what a particular candidate, in a particular moment of their life, is trying to solve.

The Definition and Experience dimensions serve readers at different awareness levels differently: a long-term job seeker who has been burned by opaque processes needs a different Experience section than a settled senior professional deciding whether this role is worth a phone call.

This chapter is a short introduction to the concept. I've written more fully about problem awareness across my No Problem series on LinkedIn and Substack, and in more depth about career inertia, Stockholm Syndrome and Region Beta Paradox in The Pain Mirror.

The articles are here: https://gregwyatt.substack.com/p/tldr

An inverted job search

By Greg Wyatt • October 7, 2026
I realise I've shared this chapter fairly recently, but there's good reason to revisit it. On Friday, I launched a new AI tool - Your Job Search Plan. You can find it here: https://your-jobsearch-plan.netlify.app/ It's based on the inversion principle below: the optimal job search is an inversion of how that job is optimally recruited. In other words, the first step in a job search should be to understand how recruiters and hiring processes seek to fill your ideal vacancy. Then to access all those channels while putting your best foot forward. It connects your applications, your networking, your CV, your LinkedIn profile, and so on, all of which should stem from your professional identity, the context of your career, the market conditions for that career, and therefore the work you'll need to do to boost your odds. One thing I'm pleased about with this tool is how it relates to the other tools and resources on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . So what seemed abstract, or painful activities without guaranteed outcome, become a practical arrow in the quiver of your search. I hope you find these tools helpful. They are a starting point, rather than a resolution. 20 - An inverted job search So, your broad approach to looking for a job is based on a product marketing strategy. How does this link to your job search and how companies hire? The next step is to recognise a job search is an inverted recruitment process. Whatever you can learn about the actual workings of recruitment, the better armed you are to navigate them. The first way in which this is true is around the routes to market employers take to fill a job. Employers want to fill vacancies in the most economical and efficient means possible. Sometimes they’ll rely on external advice, sometimes they’ll figure out their own way, and sometimes they’ll employ people to do it for them (such as a Talent Acquisition Manager or internal recruiter). When they rely on external advice, it may not surprise you it’s as varied and contradictory as job seeker advice. Take this nugget of wisdom: 80% of suitable candidates are not actively looking for work. By advertising, you’ll only have access to the 20% that applies to adverts. Hang on a minute! Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the hidden jobs market? Of course, candidates aren’t hidden - much like hidden jobs, the priority is to understand the channels through which candidates are found. These channels directly mirror the channels through which you look for that job: Job boards; LinkedIn; Recruitment agencies; Confidential headhunting; Internal promotions; Secondments; Temp-to-perm hires; Consulting-to-perm hires; Referrals; Networking; Speculative approaches; Careers pages; Talent pools; Candidate databases Every job is different, dictated by principles like supply and demand, confidentiality, reputational risk, wherewithal, budget and capacity. The hiring process of a Software Developer is different from that of a Sales Director. If an employer only hires through an advert - this means if you don’t apply for adverts, there’s no way in which you can be considered for that vacancy. A second way it’s accurate is the notion that what’s true for one may not be true for others. This relates to candidate resentment . You may read online that some recruitment behaviours are signs of a bad employer. Yet, you should always follow the instructions given when applying for an advert or through an agency. They may instruct you to: 1/ Write a CV, cover letter and duplicate it on their ATS 2/ Tell them your salary when they don’t list theirs 3/ Do 17 interviews before reaching a decision 4/ Deliver a 6-month strategy plan by presentation 5/ Or any other request deemed unreasonable by Career Coaches, Job seekers, or people otherwise uninvolved in that process What some consider red flags, others will deem acceptable practice. It becomes your choice to play the game or not. Either follow their instructions or step away. You don’t have to apply if you don’t want to. In a similar vein, if you hear a hiring process has a preference, or if there are gaps in their employment armoury - these might be biases you can lean into. The hiring manager loves Arsenal Football Club and is biased towards people who love the same? Now might be the time to switch allegiance, if you can fake it or make it. They love a one page CV? Apply with a one page CV. You know the hiring manager of an advert with 400 applications? Give them a call - they might give you an unfair advantage. Poor practice from the employer, yet these are problems you can turn into opportunity. A third way in which this is true is by comparing inbound and outbound activity Outbound activity is where you go to your prospect (phone calls, messaging). Inbound activity is where the prospect comes to you (job adverts, content). Yet an outbound activity for a recruiter is an inbound activity for you (you receive phone calls and messages). While an inbound activity has you getting in touch because of their advert or content. When we talk about optimising your work, whether your CV, profile or interviews, it has to give the process what it needs. How can you be more discoverable, so you receive more relevant calls and messages? How can you improve your return on applications and your outbound messages? What about inverse non-recruitment? A brilliant, if strange question, with the same answer. When networking, going direct, seeking to become a referral, doorknocking, or other, what is the inverse of that activity? How does that person find or recommend people, if they become aware of a vacancy? How might they see you as a person to solve their problems, even if it isn’t a vacancy? You do these activities because of how they might help you and because of the benefit the other party experiences. What’s in it for them? If there isn’t anything in it for them, why should they help you? For each and every stage in recruitment, there is an opposed force, as candidates and the hiring process meet each other. It’s rarely an equal force, because every vacancy has supply and demand, resource, skill level, biases and intent at play. This is why each type of role has a different method of looking for work. Executive vacancies typically prioritise headhunted candidates, with fewer public adverts. Here the priority shifts towards building relationships with, and being discoverable by, Executive Search recruiters. If executives rely mainly on job boards, they may never think to focus on more suited channels. If you can learn what the other needs for that process to be successful, you can deliver the same. Speak to peers, speak to hiring managers you know, speak to recruiters, speak to former job seekers. How have they found work, and how would they recruit for your roles? Research your market to find viable employers, to identify recruiters and to build your network.  Then execute an appropriate strategy to access these channels.

Hierarchy of Pain

By Greg Wyatt • September 23, 2026
I had an aborted conversation at a networking event on Tuesday. It was about a problem vacancy a fractional people lead was looking at. Her client had instructed various executive search firms and none had produced a viable candidate. It seems the consistent approach was to match CVs to job description - pureplay transactional - and none were candidates that met the goal of the vacancy. You see that organisational pain that the vacancy heals wasn't defined by documentation, and therefore if you rely on that documentation to find candidates, it's happenstance that you come across someone viable. It's such a common problem, and when I 'fix' problem vacancies, it's invariably something that isn't described which was holding back a successful hire. The irony is this shouldn't be a hidden pain - presuming it's appropriate to share, it should be front and centre. What complicates modern recruitment is that, instead of better specifying vacancies, both sides of the hiring fence increasingly rely on LLMs to produce documentation that shaves the edges off. And as a result a candidate that has extensively healed the hidden pain a vacancy might even remove the evidence from their application in a bit to better match an advert or job description. The more transactional recruitment comes, particularly through reliance on technology, the worse this problem becomes. Probably not an issue for business as usual vacancy, but when a vacancy has impact, standard process of "5 CVs by Friday" will invariably hold you back. The chapter below is from A Career Breakdown Kit , my guide for navigating a skewiff employment market. It may be for job seekers, but the problem and solution are directly mirrored by the hiring side. It's taken word for word from the book, so some of the content is interconnected with other chapters. You can read most of them for free in the Jobseeker Basics newsletter. Hierarchy of pain This chapter reflects on how buyers make decisions, how this is reflected in hiring and why it matters in how you put forward your CV, application, interviews and other messages. If you’ve ever encountered sales in your career or life you are likely familiar with the concepts of Features and Benefits. The product is what is proposed. Features are what it does. Benefits are how it helps. However there are actually three other components in this hierarchy that make up commercial messaging. Value is what the benefits mean to you. “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage” - the sizzle isn’t a benefit, if you don’t like sausages. Outcomes are the tangible long-term results from using that product or service. “Sell the picture frame, not the screwdriver” - or rather what’s in the frame. Why does it matter? The idea being these peel back the layers of the onion to help a potential customer understand exactly What’s In It For Them. Yet, it may not matter whatsoever if your brilliantly put together message doesn’t achieve one element - show how you heal their hidden pain. In that frame example above, this might be a photo of a loved one, no longer with us. The photo is for our memories and feelings. The frame has to be right, to commemorate them properly. While it needs to be mounted well, using tools that make the job easier. Could you market that loss to sell a screwdriver? Hopefully not, though the message might be, “For memories that matter,” instead of "High Quality Screwdriver". It's a common pain many share, yet not one you might discuss down the DIY shop. Early in my career I had a lesson on hidden pain and its importance. I recruited an HR Manager for a high growth business whose requirement was for someone with broad experience in a similar environment. I presented an excellent candidate who was only available due to the shutdown of her employer - she had to stay to the final day to manage the process well, which limited her availability to start work. That was the only reason I explained her current situation to this new employer, because redundancy management wasn’t on the job description. She got the job! On day one of her new employment, her role was made redundant and she was offered a retention bonus to shut down the local site - everyone was to lose their jobs. The hidden pain here was redundancy, something not even mentioned to me during the vacancy briefing, and something I never broached with Julie. IIRC, there was no mention of it during the interview process either. Perhaps that’s an extreme example, but it does show what can happen behind the scenes. And if you happened to be out of work, a fixed term contract with a retention bonus might be quite appealing. Were you to apply to that vacancy, it would be important to highlight your redundancy experience - customising your CV might even have worked against you! So how does this hierarchy fit within your job search? You are the product, with your next employer on a buyer’s journey. Your features are what you offer. In a CV this is a combination of job titles, qualifications, skills and areas of experience. It’s also your salary requirement, where you are based and other elements like Visa status and working arrangements. Get these right and a little luck might mean they are all you need, considering that these same elements are what we source and filter on. I expect in this market you’re in competition with many people that offer the same Features, so the differentiator is what you bring to the table uniquely. The contexts of your career combined with how you helped, your impact, your achievements, and what the outcomes were. Related chapters: Principles of a Good CV Should I customise my CV? LinkedIn profiles that get found LinkedIn profiles that convert These are all resources that will help you communicate the benefits of your experience, the value you bring, the problems you solve, and the outcomes of these solutions. As for the hidden pain question, which in many vacancies isn’t articulated, how can you unpick hidden? Go back to why vacancies are recruited. How did they come about in the first place? They only fit into two piles - new and replacement. However these two piles have many subcategories relating to the problems they solve and the pain they heal. Researching the company can help. Inside knowledge definitely helps - it’s one reason good agency recruiters will be a valuable ally. But this knowledge isn’t always available, and sometimes the employer may not even know! I always come back to the principle, “You can’t be all things to all people.” And when you try to do this, you appeal to no one. It’s one reason why using LLM style AI to customise CVs is so problematic. The output is necessarily same-same because it’s a probabilistic determination of what you want based on an aggregate of data. It’s why, when recruiters receive a volume of AI augmented CVs, they all look the same. Your ‘good enough’ core CV ( Should I customise my CV ) leans into your strengths. While you might tweak it to meet the essential requirements, in the language of the employer, this should naturally support your greatest strength - the unique fingerprint that is your career. The downside of relying on customisation against vague, and often misrepresentative, adverts is that you can deemphasise and even remove your biggest achievements. The same achievements that would have helped you stand out. If your application doesn’t heal the hidden pain of a vacancy, it’s either because you have not defined your strengths correctly or you aren’t that close of a fit with the actual needs of the vacancy. An example to show this pitfall in practice. I caught up with a friend yesterday who has resigned from a post that was missold to him. His career is based on commercial acumen and enablement in a field that is heavily focused on risk management and compliance. So he’s already unusual in a good way (though his CV didn’t show this). On day one of his new job, he encountered a literal unexpected disaster. While these things happen, and he managed the situation effectively, this proved a consequence of the business culture and strategy. These problems kept coming up and his functional area in the business needed a complete overhaul at executive level. Rather than the commercial enablement picture they painted, they needed someone who relished chaos - a master of disaster. Completely the opposite of the career Simon wants. This isn’t something they could publicise in their recruitment process, for reputational reasons, yet it was a fundamental baked-in aspect of the role. I’ve no doubt Simon’s CV is a match for their job description. Yet he is not a match for their job. What if they’d seen CVs of people who’d leant into strengths of healing dysfunction? What if he’d leant into his strength of enablement? He may not have left his previous job for something he went on to regret. If you’re sceptical about how crucial hidden pain is in recruitment, think about your own hidden pain when applying for jobs. What’s going on in your life that impacts which roles are ideal for you. The same points you might not divulge when you’re just trying to get back into employment. Perhaps you've even experienced the pain I did when considering a hardware purchase. How did that pain inform your buying decisions? It’s no different for employers when they consider the pain and problems inherent in their vacancy.