There is the curious effect that women are so fixated on the most desirable men that they ignore adequate men who would settle down with them, with the ultimate outcome that they turn into pesky “wine aunts” nobody can stand to have around. Similarly, I have noticed that a lot of companies believe that there is the ultimate candidate out there, with the effect that open roles may remain unfilled for a very long time. I will look at both cases and draw parallels.

The “alpha widow” effect is well-documented, i.e. the effect that a woman who served as Chad’s plaything for one night incorrectly concludes that this is the caliber of man she deserves, not realizing that such a guy would not be willing to commit to her. Even worse is the effect that some women take the best qualities of any man who ever fucked them and take this as the new baseline for their future husband. I will call this the “alpha collage” effect. Her ideal guy needs to have a dick as big as the biggest one that was ever in her, make at least as much money as the most successful guy who has ever fucked her, be at least as tall as the tallest guy who ever got into her pants, and so on. Obviously, this approach is doomed to failure. Statistically, it is infinitely worse than taking a real guy, however unattainable, as the baseline. Even a fairly average woman will be able to construct an “alpha collage” that sets a standard so high that virtually no man on earth will be able to meet it. Just take looks and money: there is no 20-year old Chad out there who has the income of a successful guy at the peak of his earning potential.

Women whose standards are too high remain single for a long time, if not forever. What is worse, feminist propaganda tells them that they age like fine wine and that they deserve the best possible guy out there. During her 20s, the typical modern woman demands more and more from her men, not realizing that her sexual market value is on a decline, first slowly but then quite steeply. Without a rapid adjustment of expectations, such women enter their 30s, needing anti-depressants just to make it through they day. Then there is the problem that even if they adjust their expectations, this does not happen quickly enough so that for a few more years they lust for men they can no longer have. In the worst case, they hit menopause and turn into cat ladies because they need a crutch to justify their existence.

In the corporate world, the human resources department is normally run by women. As a consequence, the modern workplace is quite female, i.e. the culture is fickle, erratic, and vindictive. Hiring is a great example. There are female recruiters that enjoy talking to all these male applicants who want to work at their company. There is seemingly no end to them. There is a rational approach where you keep a job ad up for a few weeks, have initial conversations with the ten or so most promising ones, and invite three or four to an on-site interview, with the goal of offering the job to one candidate. You want to make a decision quickly and if your top candidate turns you down, you approach the next one on the final ranking of candidates. Concluding a hiring cycle without having gained an employee would be seen as a rather dismal outcome due to the time and cost involved, and the problem of the role remaining open. On the other hand, there is the modern-woman approach where a job ad stays up indefinitely, hundreds of candidates get interviewed, but nobody ever gets the job. My last hiring manager told me that they had interviewed almost 200 candidates over multiple months, and I got the offer. The intention was presumably to flatter me by telling me how much they liked my profile and how happy they are that I singed the contract. In contrast, my initial thought was that these people are off their rocker. If all of them were qualified candidates, I would have taken the best of the first X clearly qualified candidates, with an X no larger than 25 or 30. By the time I joined, the position had been vacant for about one year.

A few weeks ago, a large company reached out to me about an interesting role. Everybody was friendly and very interested in my profile. The entire interview process took over two months. The mood was very positive and it seemed that chances of getting an offer were reasonably high. Then there was radio silence for a few weeks until I received a rejection. This was disappointing. Yet, days later I saw a notification on LinkedIn about a possibly fitting job, and it was the very job they had approached me about. They simply restarted the process. I hope that they will find their unicorn but more likely, at some point they will need to compromise. The likely outcome is that they will hire someone who has a less strong profile than some of the candidates they could have hired months earlier. Almost three months later, their job ad is still up.

Obviously, both women and companies can wait for their Mr. Perfect. Yet, he is not out there. The real goal is to find a guy who is somewhere on the spectrum ranging from Mr. Good Enough to Mr. Realistically Attainable. As women age, fewer and fewer men become realistically attainable and they will have to adjust their metrics for a guy being good enough pretty fast. If not, there will be absolutely no overlap of the set of guys they want and the set of guys who want them. Companies with a female corporate culture are quite similar. They enjoy lining up men for interviews and making them run the interview gauntlet, seemingly oblivious to the fact the goal is to find someone who can do the job well, and who wants to do it. Their ideal candidate surely has many other options so they also need to make a compromise. If not, this can even jeopardize the long-term viability of a company. This is not a hypothetical scenario. The economy is full of large companies who are no longer able to innovate. They are seen as career dead-ends so it will be quite difficult to turn the ship around. It could very well be that some companies were sent on a path of never-ending stagnation when hiring was taken over by political activists. We see the same in government, too, which is heavily female dominated nowadays. There are more and more bureaucrats nowadays, yet less and less gets done. Long gone are the days when ambitious people wanted to work for the government. Today, this is only the case for very specific niches.