About

Twenty-eight years in recruitment, and a lot of it spent replacing people who had already been hired to do the job.

At least 30% of my search assignments over those years have been replacements: someone left earlier than anyone expected, or stayed and didn't have the impact they were brought in to have. Director level, almost every time. What I couldn't account for was that the ones who worked and the ones who didn't often had the same skills on paper.

I had a hypothesis that the way the jobs were described was producing the mis-hires I was being paid to fix. As an external recruiter, that was as far as it could go. In 2019 I got a chance to test my hypothesis - out of curiosity I started applying for in-house TA roles.

Before I could test anything, I ran into it myself. Every job I applied for looked the same: duties, tasks, responsibilities, experience. No context. No future in any of them, just the present. Impossible to tell which offered growth, which would challenge me and which would not, or which I would be good at. I kept going, and became the thing I had spent years describing. An active job seeker, worn down by it, ready to take whatever was offered and find out afterwards whether it fitted.

Four scale-ups as talent lead followed, and I watched the same thing run from the inside. The pipeline was never empty: plausible people kept arriving, then failing at interview or dropping out before an offer. We had screened them against the document, and meeting its list of requirements is not the same as being able to do the work. A hiring manager would take the best of the people who had applied, usually with a caveat attached, because the seat was open, the search had already overrun, and the team had gone four months without leadership. Sometimes three months later they had gone, or were not doing the work they had been brought in to do. Then the replacement would open, and we would send out the same spec and the same outreach that had produced the first one. The document was the one thing nobody looked at. The numbers looked healthy the whole time, and so did the feedback from hiring managers. All of it measured the people who came. I could see the causal loop, and I reported to the person running it, so we ran it again.

Then two years working out what I had seen. It comes down to which way the force runs. Someone who responds to a document listing requirements is being pushed, out of something, by something. Someone who is doing well where they are does not respond to it at all, because it tells them nothing they need in order to decide.

None of that is a failure of effort. Internal TA runs on volume, and for most of what it is handed, volume is the right answer. The art brings people to the funnel. The science takes them through it to a decision. Where the pool has liquidity the art is redundant: enough of the right people are already looking, and the science fills the seat on its own. So it is never built. A function pointed only at liquid pools never has to develop the art.

It does not come up in interviews. Not in mine, and not in those of recruiter friends who are good at the art. Mine were about how many reqs I was used to carrying, which tools I had worked in, and what data I could get out of them. All science. Nobody asked how I wrote the document, or how I coached hiring managers on role construction. A thin job description is a fact of life, too fixed to register as something anyone could change.

Then an impact role goes to the same machine. There is nothing to reach for, and nobody in the room knows that. The pool is thin, the art is what decides who ever arrives, and the science can only sort what turns up. The art is what lets a high performer price the role: what it is, what it leads to, whether it is worth leaving something they are comfortable in. Without it there is nothing to price, and nobody gives up a good seat to enter a process and find out.

It isn't carelessness on the hiring manager's part. Their attention is spent on the thing the hire is meant to fix, and what's left over produces a description of the person required rather than the job on offer. Every document written from it inherits that.

None of it gets measured, because recruitment is a credence service: the buyer cannot judge the quality of what they bought, even after it arrives. So the trade runs on proxies instead. Logos, networks, track records, and a failure rate everyone quotes and nobody has ever sourced.

I work on key hires now, and on the documents at the top of them. I won't work the other way round.