Ask most business owners how they hire and you’ll hear: post the role, collect resumes, run a few interviews, and go with your gut. They do this whether they’re filling a $15/hour admin role or a $200,000 director seat. The stakes are completely different, yet the process never accounts for that…This is where things usually go wrong.
The Question Every Hire Should Start With
Before you write the job description, before you post the role, before you even look up a single resume, the first question should be: what does success look like in this job? Most business owners skip this and start with the job description or, worse, copy the last one. Unfortunately, a job description that’s a laundry list of tasks doesn’t tell you what the role is supposed to accomplish, or what kind of person is naturally built for it. You actually want the job description to make the candidate self-select out of applying (if they’re not the right fit).
What Skipping That Question Costs You
When a hire doesn’t work out, most owners think about the wasted salary; But that’s the lowest expense. Take a role paying $80,000/year. On average, it can take two years for a hire to get up to speed and become successful and at least three to six months to decide if their hire was successful.
By the time you’ve made that call, you’ve already spent:
- Talent acquisition and advertising costs
- Time interviewing multiple people
- Months of onboarding and training
- Three to five months of salary and benefits
- Miscellaneous cost on your team covering the skills gap
That’s tens of thousands of dollars and you haven’t even started the search over yet.
Why Most Owners Skip The Question
Mostly habit. Early on in a company, informality works fine. You typically know your culture and some of the candidates applying. It’s a very personal and connected system. But when companies grow, and roles become more complex, it can become increasingly impersonal and more difficult to find the right fit. There’s also this: hiring isn’t an owner’s full time job. Most leaders were never trained to interview. They’re great at what they do, but that doesn’t always translate into being good at evaluating talent in their field.
What Changes When You Start With Success
When you start with “what does success look like”, the hiring process gets more specific and more useful:
Figure out what the role actually needs from a person
Each and every role has a talent profile: natural behavioral traits, drivers, and competencies that make someone genuinely well suited for the work. For example, a role built around cold outreach needs different wiring than one built around deep analytical focus. Resumes don’t show this and interviews rarely do. Talent assessments? They do.
Measure candidates against the role, not each other
Most interviews end up as a comparison: who had the best answers, who wore the nicest shirt, who was entertaining? But the person you might be drawn to isn’t always the “right” person for the role. When you’ve defined success, that question gets a lot easier to answer.
Use data after the hire, not just before it
A talent assessment works like a manual. It shows how a person communicates, how they’re motivated, where they’ll need coaching, how to manage them when you hit a roadblock–it’s all there. Companies that actually use it this way shorten the ramp-up period to success (remember that two year number?) and increase their retention rates.
What It Looks Like When You Skip It
When a hire doesn’t work out it’s easy to take a victim mentality and say there were no red flags. But the warning signs were always there, you just made a decision based on your gut feeling instead.
For example: a client hired someone for a sales support role knowing the candidate really wanted the sales position. The assessment showed someone built for outside sales: high energy, relationship driven, and needs constant movement. The support role was desk work, phone calls, and process discipline.
The assessment said she’d leave, but the client moved forward regardless.
She lasted three months. With her went the cost of talent acquisition, interviewing, onboarding and training…you get the point. The client’s gut feeling told them she would be a great fit, and the assessment told them the truth.
You’re Hiring, What’s Next?
If you’re currently in a search, or about to start one, remember to ask: “what does success look like in this role?” If you need help navigating this, I offer a free 30-minute consultation where we’ll figure out your current approach and the gaps that need to be filled before you make your next offer. Book a spot on my calendar and let’s save you tens of thousands in costs.
