Here’s a tip for you: if you’re feeling a bit depressed about how your business is doing at the moment, go and see a recruiter.

Not because of their sunny personalities and positive outlook (although lots of them have that too), or because they’ll supply you with a raft of recession-beating stars (although they might). But because you can pretty much guarantee that they’re having a worse time than you are. That might not sound very nice, but it definitely puts your own problems in context.

I took one out for a coffee this week, partly for the usual reason I like to meet recruiters – to get a flavour of what else is going on in the market. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I think recruiters are great for this because they’re always chatting to people in the industry, so they tend to have a good overview. As I’ve also mentioned, I’m usually a terrible client for recruiters, because I hardly ever bung any business their way. But this time, for once, I did actually have a specific role to talk about. Although I’m still not totally sold on this COO idea, I figure that it can’t hurt to test the waters a bit, see what’s out there.

Anyway, this poor girl – who’s normally a fairly cheery, jolly-hockey-sticks sort – looked positively cowed by her experience of the last year, bless her. Apparently her agency has shrunk from 12 people to 3, and she personally had to let three of the unfortunates go. I actually felt quite bad that she doesn’t even have her own business, and yet she’s had to sack more people than me in the last year. (Although not that bad, obviously.)

I suppose I was expecting her to be fairly positive about my idea; to tell me that I’d be able to take my pick from a huge array of brilliant candidates who have seen their previous jobs disappear in a puff of recessionary smoke. But that wasn’t entirely the case. What she said – and I don’t know how true this is – was that people like this are actually in huge demand at the moment, because they’re perfect for companies looking to get a handle on their cashflow and cut costs. So she thought it might actually be quite tricky to find a good one.

I suppose she may have a point. Companies do need people like that (or better still, I’d argue, they need to be run with people with an iota of common sense). And if you’re a cost-cutting COO, the last thing you’re going to do is fire yourself, right? On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling this was kind of a subtle sales pitch (‘you’ll never find one without a good recruiter’ etc etc etc). And there was enough encouragement in there to make me think that there are people around.

But perhaps my biggest takeaway from the meeting was that I really need to give this a bit more thought. On several occasions, she asked me questions about this person’s role or ideal background, and I had to make up the answer on the spot so I didn’t look incompetent. I quite often go into a recruitment process pretty sure that I know what I want, but possibly not to the extent that I could articulate it to anyone else. I’ve just got used to thinking ‘I’ll know them when I see them’. But when you’re hiring someone at this level of seniority – with all the financial and organisational risk it implies – you can’t really get away with that.