Singapore’s unemployment rate is the envy of most developed markets – said Stuart Jones, Sales Director from Indeed. Even stripping out foreign workers, there are more open roles than job seekers — 1.79 openings for every person searching, according to Indeed. On paper, this should be one of the easiest hiring markets in the world.

It doesn’t feel that way to anyone actually in it. Candidates apply to 100, sometimes 200 roles and hear nothing. Hiring leaders sit on open reqs for months. We spoke to Stuart on Episode 5 of Inside the Hiring Room — a man who ran recruitment at Cisco, S&P Global and Bank of America before he ever sat on the vendor side — and his read on the gap is worth sitting with, because it explains something we’ve been saying since day one at Substance.

The math is real. The market isn’t lying to you.

Jones was clear on this: the ratio isn’t manufactured. There genuinely are more roles than searchers in Singapore. But a role existing and a role being fillable are two different things. “There is still a gap between clients considering talent that have the direct experience they’re looking for, and considering talent they would like to train or take a chance on,” he told us. “And that void creates this chasm.” Businesses have jobs to be done, revenue to report, and a stakeholder waiting on the other side of a metric. Taking a chance on adjacent skill is a real risk they’d rather not carry — even in a market that, on paper, should reward flexibility.

Skills-based hiring is still mostly a conference topic, not a practice.

Every hiring leader has sat through the panel on skills-based recruiting. Jones, who runs hiring for Indeed’s own Asia sales team, said the quiet part out loud: “I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think the business has taken the leap of faith to purely go after skills-based.” His own team blends skills, motivation and cultural fit rather than pure resume-matching — but he was equally clear that most talent acquisition functions don’t have “the flexibility or freedom to put it into practice without thinking about the repercussions” on the numbers they’re measured against. Skills-based hiring doesn’t fail because leaders don’t believe in it. It fails because almost nobody has built the room to actually execute it.

The candidate black hole isn’t a Singapore problem — and it starts with a brief that was never solid to begin with.

Jones’s data shows the “we never heard back” complaint is the number one job-seeker frustration globally — Spain, Germany, the US, UK, Japan, all identical. But the more useful thing he described was why it happens on the hiring side. A stakeholder hands over “a wish list — the shopping list of all skills.” Talent acquisition takes the brief, and without authority to actually cut anything, tries to “slim the JD down a bit.” By the time it reaches a candidate, “it dilutes again, and it dilutes again… it’s like a game of telephone.” Layer on a requisition system where an unfilled headcount can simply get reclaimed if it isn’t closed fast enough, and you get a structural incentive to hire safe and fast rather than well. This is precisely the failure point we built Substance around: most searches fail before they start, because the brief was never clear on what the hire actually needs to deliver. We fix that first — before a single name is approached — because everything downstream of a diluted brief is just damage control.

Two biases worth naming if you’re building a commercial leadership team right now.

Redundancy is not a performance signal. Jones was blunt: candidates who’ve been through layoffs — even multiple rounds — “shouldn’t be judged. Redundancies are no reflection of a person’s performance,” particularly when the decision sat two levels above them. If your shortlist is quietly filtering out strong GTM, Growth or Finance operators because their last two companies restructured, you are optimising for luck, not capability. Separately, in a market where “job hugging” is now the rational move for anyone risk-averse, the candidates who do move are self-selecting for conviction — but hiring managers still default to exact-tenure-match bias, which shrinks an already resilient pool for no defensible reason.

Where this leaves a hiring leader today.

None of this is an argument for lowering the bar. It’s an argument for fixing the sequence. A search doesn’t fail at the interview stage — it fails at the brief stage, weeks earlier, when nobody agreed what the hire actually needs to deliver against the P&L. That’s the whole premise behind how we run GTM, Growth, Commercial Finance and Strategy searches: one senior recruiter, brief to offer, no handoffs, no dilution through a junior desk, and a shortlist small enough that every name on it has actually cleared the bar.

If a role has been open longer than it should be — or it’s one you genuinely cannot afford to get wrong — book a 20-minute call.

The full conversation with Stuart Jones, and every episode of Inside the Hiring Room, goes deeper than any blog post can. Follow along on Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok — new rooms, new hiring leaders, no scripts.