Despite the emotional damage inflicted by reading that email, I reread it several times, trying to identify the service I was supposedly paying this recruitment agent to perform. How could she comment on the absurdity of my name when hers was Echinacea? She was literally named after a herb that some archaic civilisations claimed prevented the common cold.

The email was a true work of evil art, and I couldn’t help breaking down its component parts. On one hand, she recommended that every candidate listed should be employed by me; at the same time, she made it abundantly clear that none of them were suitable. She had deliberately found a good candidate, waited until that candidate was no longer available, and then sent me her missive informing me it was my fault I had missed out.

It was like dealing with a confidence fraudster who becomes more assertive and impatient the moment you start questioning their tricks. The email was crafted with meticulous precision: upon arrival, it instilled hope that a solution might be at hand, and by the time you reached the end, you were under no illusion that this person had done their very best to avoid helping you—while still clearly putting in billable effort to do so.

After perhaps the fourth reading, something occurred to me. This level of quality was unusual. I had dealt with recruitment agents before; none had been this meticulously destructive. Most mixed incompetence with their lack of support. In fact, in most cases, it was the incompetence that eventually allowed an organisation like mine to sift through poor recommendations and find someone half-decent.

Echinacea, however, was impressive. There was literally no benefit to be found in her recommendations. She had correctly identified candidates who would be extremely destructive to my business and put them forward without shame. She left no chink, no sliver of hope.

A plan began to form.

I made two phone calls.

The first was to my only current employee, Jeremy. I didn’t openly call him an employee to his face—I possess a keen sense of self-preservation—but so far he had been behaving like one, so I felt comfortable doing so in private. After a minute of awkward and painful conversation, I believe he agreed to attend the meeting I had suggested.

The second phone call was to Echinacea, requesting another face-to-face meeting. She reluctantly agreed, and with that, I had finally managed to extract value from this fetid profession.

Echinacea had presented me with the perfect candidate.

Her.

I could only hope that Jeremy would be as good at negotiating with her as he was at blackmailing me.