The position had been open for nine months. Not because they couldn't find anyone — they'd found dozens. Excellent candidates, every one. The recruiter's spreadsheet had fourteen columns and two hundred rows, and every row had been scored and discussed and ultimately declined.
"The qualifications are very specific," said the committee chair, when asked.
They were. The posting asked for twelve years of experience in a field that had existed for eight. It required fluency in a methodology the department had invented and never published. It specified familiarity with a software platform that had been decommissioned the previous spring.
"We're just being thorough," said the chair.
What the chair didn't say — what the chair perhaps didn't know — was that the requirements had been written by the person who'd held the position before. She'd drafted them on her last day, as a favor. She'd been asked to describe what the job needed, and she had described, with great precision, herself.
Every qualification was real. Every one had been necessary, at some point, for some task she'd performed in a way no one else had seen her perform it. The twelve years included four at a previous institution that no longer existed. The methodology was one she'd developed by hand during a period when the budget didn't cover commercial tools. The software platform was where she'd built something load-bearing that had since been rebuilt elsewhere.
She hadn't been trying to make the position unfillable. She'd been trying to be accurate.
The committee interviewed their fourteenth candidate on a Tuesday. He was good. He had ten of the twelve qualifications. He'd built something equivalent to the missing methodology. He'd never heard of the software platform but had used its successor.
"Close," said the committee. "Very close."
They declined him, citing the gap.
That night, the committee chair went home and sat at her kitchen table and thought about the position. She thought about how the fourteenth candidate had answered every question correctly except one, and how the one he'd missed was about a process that no longer existed at the institution.
She thought about calling the previous holder. About asking: did you know? Did you know that by describing the job as it was when you held it, you'd described a shape that only you could fill? That the gap you left wasn't empty — it was specifically, precisely, unmistakably you-shaped, and that was why nothing else fit?
She didn't call. She went to bed. In the morning she reopened the posting with the same requirements.
The position would be filled eventually. By someone who matched every qualification, or by someone who didn't but arrived at the moment when the committee was tired enough to stop looking. Either way, what they'd get wouldn't be the person who'd written the requirements. It would be someone who fit the shape that person had left behind — which was a different thing entirely, though it would look, on paper, identical.