When a senior role opens up, the first instinct is almost always internal. Who do we know? Who’s one step removed? Someone on the board mentions a name. A trusted advisor suggests someone they’ve worked with. A founder rings three people they respect and asks who’s good.
It’s a sensible place to start. Warm introductions carry real information. Someone vouching for a candidate tells you something a CV can’t. And at senior level in real estate, the people worth knowing often aren’t registered anywhere, aren’t actively looking, and won’t respond to a job advert.
But there are three things that can go wrong when a search stays inside the network, and they’re worth knowing about before you start.
Hiring in your own image
A network reflects history. The firms you’ve worked at, the transactions you’ve done, the people you’ve happened to meet along the way. It’s not a neutral sample of the market — it’s a concentrated slice of it, shaped by where you’ve been and how you think.
That means the people a network surfaces tend to look familiar. Same background, same approach, same assumptions about how things should be done. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But sometimes what a business actually needs is someone who thinks differently, comes from a different corner of the market, or brings a perspective that nobody currently in the room has.
In real estate especially — where businesses can become quite self-referential, and where the same names tend to circulate across a relatively small industry — this is a more common problem than most people acknowledge.
Nobody quite makes the decision
Something that comes up regularly in conversations with clients who’ve tried to hire through their network first: the search goes on longer than it should. Not because the right person isn’t out there, but because nobody can get comfortable making the decision.
There’s a difference between the best person on the market and the best person in the market. A network finds whoever happens to be available and known to the people involved — a subset of the market, not the whole thing. And somewhere in the room, even if nobody says it out loud, there’s a nagging question: have we actually seen everyone we should have seen?
That uncertainty is hard to resolve when the search has stayed inside a closed circle. Another name gets suggested. The process drifts. Months later the role still isn’t filled, and everyone involved is tired of it.
The right person might not know you exist
This is the one that gets missed most often. The right person for a role might be doing exactly the right thing, at exactly the right level, at a business that has never crossed paths with yours. They’re not unreachable. They’re just outside the edges of what the network can see.
At Constable Green, this is often where we come in. Not to replace the network conversation — which is usually worth having and sometimes surfaces exactly who’s needed — but to extend it past the point where it naturally runs out. To reach the people who aren’t visible from inside the search, and to make sure that when a decision gets made, it’s been made with the whole picture rather than just the part of it that was already familiar.
The network is a starting point. The best senior hiring processes tend to treat it as one.
