This simple idea will begin a hiring revolution at your company and it needs to be on the first page of your company handbook.
Never make an offer to a candidate without asking the hiring manager this question first:
What does the person need to do in this role to be considered a successful hire and why is this candidate qualified to do this?
If the manager’s answer is vague, defensive or bullheaded DO NOT MAKE AN OFFER!
It’s likely you’ll be hiring the wrong person.
Now rather than waiting until making the offer and to ensure you’re hiring the right person, the same question should be asked during the first intake meeting.
Gallup’s research is unambiguous: the #1 driver of employee engagement is knowing what’s expected of you at work.
This is Q1 in their Q12 engagement survey: “Tell people what they’re supposed to do!”
Not compensation. Not perks. Not even culture. It’s Role Clarity.
And yet we’ve built an entire hiring system that avoids role clarity at every turn. Job descriptions that list credentials, skills and experience instead of outcomes. Interview processes that assess personality instead of capability. AI systems now automating the whole mess at scale.
Why? The excuse: it’s hard, managers fight it, compliance, we’ve tried that and it didn’t work, we’ve always done it this way. etc. etc. etc. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Forget the excuses. The current and archaic approach for writing job descriptions that most companies still use:
- Ensures candidates are filtered in and out unfairly
- You don’t see enough of the best people
- It sets up new hires to fail.
- Worse: it bleeds unseen profit at every step.
To begin to solve the problem, you can use our library of performance-based job descriptions as a staring point during the intake meeting.They were all built starting with this question”
What does the person need to do to be successful in this role?
For new hires, these become the hiring criteria. Clarity then flows through the entire system from pre- to post-hire. The new hire knows exactly what’s expected. The manager knows exactly what to measure. The company knows exactly whether the person succeeded.
This isn’t complicated. It’s just different from what we’ve always done. And now using AI, any job can be defined this way in a few minutes.
The Kaizen for Hiring Audit Quantifies the Financial Impact of Hiring Waste
Last week we conducted eight Kaizen Hiring Audits to identify and quantify the impact of of bad hiring processes. The pattern was the same everywhere: 5-10% of operating profit lost annually to hiring dysfunction for one big reason:
Because job descriptions aren’t really job descriptions, they’re people descriptions.
This is the root cause of most hiring problems: a job description should define the work BEFORE defining the person doing it.
And not implementing this simple idea costs every company in the world 5-10% of its pre-tax profit.
Take the audit and see how much it’s costing your company. It will likely look like the pie chart below.
Why Skills-Based Hiring Isn’t Enough
There’s a movement gaining momentum: skills-based hiring. Drop the degree requirements. Focus on capabilities. This is a great shift since it expands the talent pool, but it’s not enough.
Consider this real example from 1985. I had a search for a Controller for a major tech company. The VP Finance wanted someone with strong SEC reporting skills, 3-5 years at least. When I asked how these skills would be used on the job he said,
“Coordinate quarterly reporting with our CPA firm under tight deadlines while managing three staff accountants”
That’s a very different bar. The first question screens for a super talented technical expert. The second defines what success actually looks like: a strong project manager who manages complex activity under tight deadlines.
The result: they hired someone from me who had coordinated this SEC reporting effort at his current F500 company. Once. He had three months experience doing it. But it was enough. He handled the requirement perfectly at his new company and the one after that, too.
Yet Joe (his real name) would never have been seen or hired if this question wasn’t asked first,
“How is this skill actually used on the job?”
Not asking this simple question continues to cost companies 5-10% in operating profit every year.
The OKR and Performance Matters Connection
John Doerr’s work on Objectives and Key Results transformed how companies think about strategy and execution. Clear objectives, measurable results, cascading alignment. Todd Rose’s work on the “End of Average” says everyone can be better doing work that motivates them to excel. Alfred Adler said the same thing 100 years ago: people are driven by an opportunity to become better.
When we’re clear about what needs to be accomplished, everything works better.
Candidates understand what they’re signing up for. New hires hit the ground with focus. Current employees know how their work matters. Companies make better decisions at every level.
The technology exists to make this practical at scale.
AI is forcing the question. Will we automate the dysfunction, or use this moment to build something better?
The choice as always belongs to leadership. Not by following the leader, but by being the leader that everyone else follows.
Being that leader starts with one simple question.
Our totally revised Performance-based Hiring workshopallows recruiters and hiring managers to experience the profound difference of hiring for results.
The complimentary Kaizen for Hiring auditincludes a simple pilot program to validate the impact of these ideas.
At our “Moneyball for HR!” discussion group we challenge the CW.