🗓️ Idiom: Needle in a Haystack
💬 Meaning
- Something that is extremely difficult or nearly impossible to find due to being hidden or surrounded by many other things.
- Often used in recruitment when trying to locate one ideal candidate among many unsuitable ones.
🧠 Example Sentences
- Finding a bilingual accountant with ten years of experience felt like searching for a needle in a haystack.
- Sorting through hundreds of unqualified resumes made the perfect applicant seem like a needle in a haystack.
- Trying to locate the right file without a naming system was like finding a needle in a haystack.
🏛️ Origin
This idiom comes from the literal image of trying to find a small, thin needle lost in a large pile of hay. It dates back to the 1500s and is used to describe extremely challenging searches.
📝 Practice Exercises
1. Fill in the blank:
Trying to recruit the perfect candidate from thousands of applicants felt like looking for a __________.
Answer
needle in a haystack
2. Choose the correct meaning of “needle in a haystack”:
A) A common mistake
B) An easy decision
C) Something very difficult to find
Answer
C) Something very difficult to find
3. Rewrite the sentence using the idiom:
“It was very hard to find the one qualified person among the many applicants.” → Change the sentence using: needle in a haystack
Answer
Finding the one qualified person among the many applicants was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
ℹ️ Other Useful Pages
👉 HR and Recruitment Idioms
👉 Business English Idioms List
👉 Student Space
👉 Tutor Toolkit