Did you know that for a very short while in my life, I was a recruiter?
Spoiler alert, I was completely terrible at it - I wasn’t motivated by the compensation structure, I hated making outbound calls or cold messaging people on LinkedIn, I would always crack when it came to negotiating salary, and ended up in tears a few times when deals fell through.
Still, I learned a lot about hiring and talent through the process, so my ears always perk up when I hear passing conversations at conferences -
“It’s so hard to find good people.”
“We can’t hire for this role.”
“There’s a talent shortage.”
And sometimes, that’s completely true.
But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m starting to wonder if what’s really being said isn’t, “We need experience,” but rather, “We don’t have this role fully defined yet.”
Because those are not the same thing.
When to Turn to Experience
If the role is brand new to your organization, if the deliverables live mostly in someone’s head, if success hasn’t been clearly articulated, if the workflows are still fuzzy and undocumented, then yes. Hiring someone who has done the job before makes a lot of sense.
You’re not just hiring execution at that point. You’re hiring structure. You’re hiring the lived experience of someone who has worked off of a playbook (or multiple playbooks), knows how to adapt these experiences and when to turn to best industry practices.
This is rational, strategic, and very often the right call.
But it’s also expensive, and it narrows your talent pool significantly.
How could you cast a wider net? I think the answer lies in better defining not just the role, but the deliverables. The more clearly you define the expected outcomes, the less dependent you become on someone else having done it before.
The Moment You Define Deliverables, Everything Shifts
When you’ve taken the time to document:
What the role is actually responsible for
What “good” looks like
What metrics matter
What the handoffs are
What the cadence of the work is
You’re no longer hiring someone to invent the job for you, you’re hiring someone to execute the playbook you’ve built for your organization.
Now, you can look further afield because now you can hire for skills instead of résumé symmetry.
Everyone has their ‘thing’
You can train someone on:
Your PSA system (I would know), your internal approval flows, your reporting cadence, your company’s brand and beliefs, unique service offering and value proposition
I think it’s much harder to train:
Being a natural at sales (which for me personally is something impossible to learn and I am in awe of people who can do this naturally)
High attention to detail and an eye for the minutiae (I’m better at this, but had to Google how to spell minutiae)
Genuine care and compassion for customers
Leadership skills and the ability to inspire
Blue sky idealists and the ability to think outside the box
None of these things are industry specific - we see them every day in different roles and titles. There are plenty of candidates applying who have these skills and have developed them well of the course of their career - just, maybe, outside your industry,
What’s working for you?
Depending on the maturity of your organization, the push to document and define roles, or your growth trajectory, hiring is going to be a mix of art and science at every step of the journey. So I’m wondering - if you’re in charge of hiring, what’s been working for you? How did you find your best candidates? Were there any hires who surprised you - good or bad? Let me know!
