For months and months now, there’s a word that’s been whispered among recruiters, founders, CXOs, and executives who are hiring for key positions in their companies.

It’s a word used to describe a cohort of professionals whose salaries are out of sync with the reality of the market. It’s a word that is used for people who work in product management, engineering, marketing, and even cross-functional roles.

Meet the “unhireables”. They live among us. They work in our offices. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see that their careers are paralysed. Some of them are actively seeking jobs, but their interviews end abruptly once they inform the recruiter of their current compensation. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re unhireable.

Between 2020 and 2022, investors pumped billions of dollars into startups whose founders and leaders offered up the mythical “hypergrowth” narrative. Those startups, in turn, pumped money to hire and grow a layer of mid-level and senior-level executives whose job was to deliver on that hypergrowth narrative.

And salaries went through the roof. Hikes of 50% and above were par for the course.

Cut to the present.

If overvalued startups are widely recognised as a problem, can overvalued employees escape the same fate?

This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Akshaya Chandrasekaran with audio engineering by Rajiv CN and creative inputs from Anushka Mukherjee and Snigdha Sharma.

Listen to how Apple is building an army of ‘faithfuls’ in one of the most price-sensitive markets in the world, on Daybreak, a business podcast by The Ken.

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