There's a phrase that kills more good hires than any bad candidate ever could.
"We need someone senior."
I hear it constantly. In fintech. In trading technology. In market data. Across every segment I work in.
And here's what I've learned after years of recruiting in complex technical environments: most of the time, "senior" doesn't mean what companies think it means.
It doesn't mean experienced. It doesn't mean exceptional.
It means safe.
The real translation
When a hiring manager says "we need someone senior," what they're usually saying is:
"I need someone I can't be blamed for hiring."
Think about what happens in a typical senior hire. The job spec gets inflated. Five stakeholders get pulled into the process. Three rounds become six. Every interviewer is looking for a reason to say no rather than a reason to say yes.
And when a strong candidate comes through, someone with clear capability, sharp thinking, genuine potential, the conversation shifts.
"They haven't done this exactly before." "They're a bit of a risk." "Let's keep looking."
The search drags on for four months. The team carries the gap. Eventually someone gets hired who ticks every box on paper, costs 40% more, and turns out to be... fine.
Why it happens
This isn't incompetence. It's rational self-protection.
Hiring is one of the few decisions at work where the downside is highly visible and personal. A bad hire gets traced back to you. A slow hire? That's just "being thorough."
So the instinct is to build consensus. Get more people in the room. If the hire goes wrong, no single person made the call. The decision was collective. The blame is diffused.
The result is a process designed not to find the right person, but to avoid hiring the wrong one.
Those are not the same thing.
What gets lost
Here's what consensus-driven, risk-averse hiring consistently filters out:
Candidates who are strong on trajectory but light on tenure. They've done 80% of the role and would grow into the rest in 90 days. But they get screened out because their CV doesn't map neatly to the job spec.
Candidates who think differently. They approach problems in ways that make interviewers slightly uncomfortable, because it's not how the company currently does it. That discomfort gets labelled as "culture fit."
Candidates who are honest about gaps. The ones who say "I haven't done X but here's how I'd approach it" get marked down, while candidates who confidently overstate their experience sail through.
The people who make it through risk-averse processes tend to be very good at interviewing for senior roles, not necessarily very good at doing them.
The domain knowledge trap
Domain expertise matters. I'm not going to tell you otherwise. In financial services technology, context is genuinely valuable.
But there's a version of "domain knowledge" that becomes a way to eliminate candidates without accountability. "They don't know our stack." "They haven't worked in this specific regulatory environment." "They've never done this particular workflow."
What these objections often really mean: "I don't want to take a chance on someone I'd have to develop."
The irony is that the candidates companies pass on for "gaps" are often the ones who'd adapt fastest, because they've had to develop their judgement rather than rely on institutional familiarity.
The question worth asking
If you're a hiring leader, one question cuts through the noise:
Are we hiring to find the best person for this role, or to protect ourselves from a bad hire?
If your process involves five stakeholders, six rounds, and a job spec that requires twelve years of experience for a role that didn't exist eight years ago, that's the second one.
The fear of hiring the wrong person is costing you the right one.
And that cost is mostly invisible, because you never see the compounded output of the hire you didn't make.
Richard