Your unicorn doesn’t exist. Better learn how to create it yourself

Everyone who has ever hired has at some point been guilty of wanting top talent for bottom dollar. And post-pandemic, it almost seems that employers have no choice but to demand top talent.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 report puts it concisely: the writing is on the wall for anything that can be automated, be it blue-collar or white-collar, manual or digital, creative or critical. Organisations that apply today’s level of AI and automation technology appropriately just don’t need to hire certain tiers of talent any more.

At a time when hiring budgets are flattening out amid geopolitical and global economic uncertainty, that potential is manifesting in the mindset that employers now have to hire for 200% value on any given role. This is nothing new - job descriptions abound that are aspirational at best and exploitative at worst - but it is not and has never been a practical way of approaching talent acquisition.

Why? Simply because the kind of talent that can give 200% returns is rare to begin with. A job description calling for an unicorn, or for someone willing and capable of doing work two levels up for pay one level down, by nature excludes most of the workforce from consideration. And automated resume filtering bakes that flaw into the system.

On top of this, the approach of asking for the world perpetuates gender disparities in hiring. Research has shown that women will tend to only apply for jobs where they are certain they meet most or all of the requirements; men, on the other hand, will tend to apply as aspirationally as the job description is written.

LinkedIn’s Sumita Tandon made the brilliant observation that your next hire is already in your organisation. You don’t necessarily need to hire from outside, she pointed out; you can identify and train your own top talent from within the people you already have, often with much quicker and more effective returns on investment than you would get from onboarding and orienting someone completely new.

The flip side of this is of course that an organisation’s hiring, training, and retention processes must have been robust enough to bring in, nurture, and keep that calibre of talent for some time. And, critically, there must have been a cultural willingness to recognise and uplift potential regardless of biases.

Some time ago, our team had to hire at a senior level. We found a massive gender-based split amongst candidates. The overwhelming majority of women candidates were excellent individual contributors, but despite years in the industry, had never received the training or exposure to work at higher levels - the prerequisite for being able to advance into management. In contrast, the majority of men candidates, regardless of their quality as individual contributors, had received some kind of exposure or opportunities to advance.

Studies of behavioural confirmation have found since the 1970s that people perform the way they are expected to. Tell an employee they have talent and potential, and when you give them the opportunity they will do their best to live up to the expectation - opening doors to give them even more opportunities. Conversely, tell them they are incompetent and withhold opportunities, and watch their performance plummet to the level of the label. It becomes a self-perpetuating system of wastage that kills the goose before it ever lays a single golden egg.

Organisations that have the capacity to break that cycle need to do so. High-tier talent is not a line of exclusive luxury goods made more valuable by manufactured scarcity. It is a resource that can and should be developed, and the more commonplace it is, the more everyone benefits.

You trained them, you don’t own them, deal with it

One very common argument against investing in talent is “But they’ll leave for my competitor and I’ll have wasted all the resources and time spent on training them!”

It’s true, this isn’t the 19th-century or even early-20th-century United States; you can’t handcuff your best worker to their desk or chain the office door shut. And the law in a lot of places today does not favour unreasonable restrictions on talent mobility, nor is it possible to prevent good employees from receiving and taking up new opportunities. Unicorns are not retained by sick systems. But that should not be an argument against developing them. An organisation that holds its talent back is ruining its own competitive advantage.

There is a reason why employee engagement, wellbeing, work-life balance, and related concepts remain a hot topic long after the pandemic and its associated upheavals in hiring have ended. All these things are another form of investing in talent, and the returns manifest as the retention of homegrown unicorns and potential unicorns.

This article was first published in the February 2025 edition of People Matters Perspectives.