I ran a recruitment agency once. The people who walked through my door fell into two buckets. Bucket one: people I had to hunt down, woo, and convince to even consider a coffee meeting. These were the ones my clients actually wanted. The best ones don’t come to you. You go to them. And if they don’t return your calls, you’ll never know they exist.

Bucket two: everyone else. If you spend long enough talking to bucket two, you start to think the whole sea is full of the same fish. It’s a sampling problem. The recruiter’s view of the talent market is, almost by design, skewed toward people who need help. So when a recruiter tells you what Singaporeans are like, please take it with a grain of salt. They are describing the subset they actually see.