Why The Best Talent Might Never Want Your Full-Time Job – Episode 41 With Elina Liehu

Listen now on:

Elina is the founder of Ferovalo and Best Best Talent Platform, with two decades of experience in talent and resourcing and the last ten years focused specifically on interim management.

Key Takeaways

1. Check how fresh your internal experience really is: Someone on your team may have solved a similar problem before, but if that was three or five years ago, the market may already have changed. Before assigning a new strategic project internally, ask whether you have the most relevant and recent experience available.
2. Use independent experts for speed, not only flexibility: A senior permanent hire can take months to recruit and onboard. Elina shared an example of an interim CFO going from first client contact to working on-site in just five days. When the problem is urgent, compare the cost of the expert with the cost of waiting.
3. Bring external talent in before your team becomes overloaded: When a new transformation or critical project appears, the people inside the company still have their existing jobs. If everyone around the management table is asking who can take ownership, that may be the right moment to bring in external expertise instead of adding another responsibility internally.
4. Build trust around the specific assignment: A strong CV or generic reference is not enough. Elina checks references against the actual project and asks whether the client would hire that person again for similar work. The right expert for one assignment may be completely wrong for another.
5. Don’t reject someone because they look overqualified: Experienced independents choose projects for different reasons than employees choose jobs. If someone with 20+ years of experience genuinely wants your six-month or three-day-a-week assignment, focus on whether they can solve the problem — not on why they do not want a permanent role.

👉 Browse 70,000+ freelancers on freelancermap — find your next expert in days, not months

Your company’s experience may be older than you think

Imagine your company is starting something new.

Someone around the management table remembers that Jack did something similar in his previous job, so the obvious decision is made: Jack should lead it. There is only one small problem. Jack has already been with the company for three years.

As Elina put it, that means the experience you are relying on is at least three years old.

“Do we really have the latest experience? Do we really have experience on this specific task?”

It is a surprisingly uncomfortable question.

Companies naturally look inside first. It feels safer. You know the people, you know what they are capable of, and there is no additional hiring decision to justify.

But experience has a shelf life.

Markets change. Technology changes. Customer behavior changes. And when someone has spent years inside one organization, they become extremely knowledgeable about that organization — while potentially seeing fewer versions of the same problem elsewhere.

That is one of the underappreciated advantages of independent experts.

They move.

One transformation ends and another begins. One company launches a system; another restructures a function; another needs a CFO during a transition.

Instead of asking only, “Who inside our company has done this before?”, perhaps the better question is:

“Who has solved this problem most recently — and several times?”

👉 Sign up and post a project on freelancermap to start receiving proposals from IT experts and specialists

Sometimes the advantage isn’t cost. It’s speed.

Hiring a senior permanent leader takes time. Finding candidates, interviews, negotiations, notice periods and onboarding can turn an urgent business problem into a six-month recruitment project.

Independent hiring plays by different rules.

During the conversation, Elina shared one case where a CFO went from the client’s first contact to actually working with the company in five days.

That changes the economics of the decision.

The comparison is no longer simply: employee salary vs. freelancer daily rate.

It becomes:

What is the cost of leaving this problem unsolved for another six months?

This is particularly important during transformations. The people you would normally ask to lead a new initiative still have their normal jobs to do.

As Elina pointed out, when a management team starts looking around the table asking, “Who is going to take charge of this?”, that is precisely the moment when an external expert should at least become one of the options.

Because there is a limit to how many “strategic priorities” can simply be stacked on top of somebody’s existing workload.

External help isn’t an admission of failure

One of Elina’s most interesting comparisons was with a personal trainer.

You don’t hire a personal trainer because you have failed at being a human being. You hire one because this person has helped hundreds of people solve a particular problem and therefore brings knowledge you do not have.

Yet companies do not always think this way.

There can still be an uncomfortable feeling that bringing an external expert into a project somehow tells employees, executives or even the board:

“We couldn’t solve this ourselves.”

Elina argues almost exactly the opposite.

A good management team understands where additional experience could improve the chances of reaching the future it has already planned.

“You still could be very good, but you are not good enough if you are having a certain type of future that you have been planning.”

Knowing where you need help is not evidence of weak management.

It is part of management.

Fast hiring still needs trust

Of course, there is an obvious objection. If permanent executives can go through five or six interview stages, how can a company confidently hire an interim manager in days?

Elina’s answer is not to remove diligence.

It is to compress it.

At Ferovalo, references are checked before candidates are presented to clients. Elina does not simply ask whether somebody is a nice person. She wants to understand where the two people worked together, what role the candidate played, how they worked and, perhaps most importantly:

Would you hire this person again for the same work?

Sometimes the answer is already visible in the relationship. The reference has worked with the expert in one company and later hired them again somewhere else.

That is a rather powerful testimonial.

Reference calls do not have to become another lengthy recruitment bureaucracy either. Elina described them as roughly 15-minute conversations, and because the process moves quickly, she normally has only around two days to complete the checks.

One reference was so busy that the only available slot was while travelling to the airport at 5am.

Elina called at 5am.

Not every hiring process needs that level of commitment, but the principle matters: speed does not have to mean guessing.

There is no universally perfect freelancer

There is another important difference between building a talent database and actually matching independent experts.

Context matters.

Elina deliberately checks people against a specific assignment, rather than deciding once that somebody is simply a “good candidate.”

Her reasoning is simple:

“One person could be perfect on certain type of assignment, and at the same time, not at all good in certain type of assignment.”

That is particularly relevant when hiring senior independents.

A brilliant CFO for a scale-up transformation is not automatically the right CFO for a restructuring. A fantastic fractional CMO for entering a new market may be the wrong person to optimise an established marketing organisation.

Hiring freelancers better therefore starts before sourcing. You need to understand the business problem you are actually hiring them to solve.

Stop being afraid of “overqualified”

One of the strangest things companies sometimes do is reject extremely strong independent professionals because they appear too experienced for the assignment.

Elina sees this regularly.

A client looks at somebody with decades of leadership experience and asks why that person could possibly want a three-day-a-week, six-month project.

Her answer is wonderfully simple:

“If they think that this is interesting project for them, be happy. You get them. Don’t question why.”

Independent professionals optimise their careers differently.

Some want flexibility. Some want variety. Some are fascinated by the specific problem but have no interest in spending five years inside the organisation.

That is not a warning sign.

It may be exactly why you suddenly have access to someone you could never convince to accept the equivalent permanent role.

And perhaps that is the biggest mindset shift companies still need to make.

The future workforce isn’t necessarily employees or freelancers. It is permanent teams supported by the right external expertise, brought in at the right moment, for the right problem.

Elina puts the speed difference beautifully:

“New manager comes in, then it takes 100 days to get in. Interim manager is 100 hours, sometimes it’s 100 minutes.”

Sometimes you need someone to grow with the company for years. And sometimes you simply need someone who has already solved tomorrow’s problem several times before.

Tips for success

1. Ask “time, skill or experience?”

Before opening another permanent vacancy, write down what is actually missing: capacity, specialist skill, current experience — or all three.

2. Hire against the assignment

Define the result you need from the next three or six months instead of starting with a generic job description.

3. Ask one powerful reference question

Instead of “Was this person good?”, ask: “If you had this same problem again, would you hire this person again?”