Push, pull, and the diagnostic that separates a hire who turns up from a hire who commits.
A finance hire arrives. The CV was right. The interview answers were measured. The references checked out. Eighteen months later, they have gone. Or worse, they stayed and disengaged.
This is not a hiring failure in the usual sense. The candidate met the brief. They were not under-qualified, mis-sold, or mis-managed. The cause sits before all of those. The question about motivation that should have been asked before offer never was.
Real commitment depends on how well the role matches what the candidate actually wants. The two forces are simple. They are read wrong all the time.
Lee and Mitchell (Academy of Management Review, 1994) showed that people leave jobs through several different paths, not one. Holtom et al. (2005) studied over 1,200 people who quit. Most of them quit because of a specific event, not because of slow-burning dissatisfaction. Maertz and Griffeth (2004) listed eight different things that drive people to leave. A candidate will mention two or three of them in an intro call. The 2025 synthesis of this literature (Hom and Kiazad, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology) finds the same patterns have continued to hold; the field has moved from "why employees leave" to "why employees stay".
Push and pull produce a frame. Not a strict box. Every real candidate sits somewhere on a scale. The frame shows where a search will stall.
The common instinct in finance hiring is to favour passive candidates and to discount the immediately available. Three field studies, one finance dataset, and one labour-economics finding reverse that view.
None of those three studies are finance-specific. They cover generic US, Swedish, and Swiss job markets. What they share is a clean experimental design and a converging direction: short-window availability carries little negative signal. The mechanism is likely to apply to senior finance hiring even if the specific thresholds do not transfer cleanly.
The 2023 UK field experiment by Kristal et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 9,022 résumé submissions to real employers across eight sectors) confirms the pattern in this market: employment gaps depress callback rates, but the penalty is meaningfully mitigated by how the gap is framed. Meier and Obermeier (Economic Journal, 2025) replicate the duration-screening effect in German data, finding that interview probability falls by roughly 50% in the first six months of unemployment. The mechanism is consistent across the US, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany.
Mueller, Spinnewijn and Topa (American Economic Review, 2021) explain why. About 85% of the unemployment penalty comes from a selection effect, not a skill loss. The strongest candidates leave the unemployed pool first. The remaining candidates are not less skilled. They are just the ones left.
UK-specific evidence completes the picture. Arulampalam (Economic Journal, 2001) found a 6% wage penalty on re-entry for those who had been out of work, rising to 14% three years later. Extended unemployment matters. Short-window availability does not.
Finance-specific evidence runs in the same direction.
In the buy side, availability is often a market event, not a personal failure. A senior fund finance professional becomes available because the fund wound down, the GP consolidated, the strategy closed, a portco was sold, or a post-acquisition team was unwound. The market produces these candidates. The candidates are not the problem.
The pattern is sharper in the current cycle than in any I have run BSR through. The wave of post-2022 fund wind-downs is still working through. AI is reshaping which finance roles get kept human. The 2022-23 comp-inflation peak is over, which means hiring managers can no longer fix a misalignment by paying more. More candidates on the market, less room to overpay, and more pressure to choose well. Misreading availability has never been more expensive.
The lesson is not that availability does not matter. It is that availability tells you nothing on its own. A redundancy after eighteen months of strategy drift is not the same as a redundancy on the day a fund made its final exit. Same status. Different signal.
"I am not actively looking but open to the right opportunity" has at least three plausible meanings.
Each is a different kind of hire. None of them is automatically the strong one.
The vetting question is no longer "are they good?". It is three questions. What is the push? What is the pull? Will the two still match up six months in?
Asking the candidate is not enough. Schmidt and Hunter (Psychological Bulletin, 1998) first measured the gap; Sackett et al. (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022) revised the figures downward but the relative gap held.
Highhouse (2008) found that hiring managers keep ignoring the evidence. They rely on personal intuition and experience instead. They trust their gut more than the data tells them they should.
The discipline is checking from several angles. Compare what the candidate tells you against their career pattern. Against references you found yourself, not the list they gave you. Against how they behave in the process. Against the language they use when they are not on script. A motivation that holds up under all five sources is a motivation you can plan around.