Because the seat is broken, not the people. If you have advertised the same job twice inside a few months, it is almost always one of three things. The job is really two jobs and no single person can hold both. Or the person had the responsibility but not the authority, so every decision still came back to you. Or nobody ever told them what good looked like, so they were judged on a standard they were never shown. Rewriting the advertisement fixes none of those.
The seat that did not exist until the interview
The worst hire in the operating history of the people who built Summit was a woman the founder still admires. The company had tripled its routes in a fortnight and needed somebody in the field standing for him with the drivers. She came in for a driver interview, thirty-five years driving, hard, blunt and direct, and he decided in the room that she would be his field manager. Skills are learned, he told himself. He would teach her the rest.
She was loyal and worked as hard as anyone he ever employed. What she could not do was carry a message so that people moved because she asked. Within months she was disliked by nearly every driver, and when he moved her back to driving, she quit.
The lesson he took was not about her. The job she was hired into had not been written down. There was thirty-five years of evidence for one job and none at all for the one she was actually given, and nobody had asked the only question that mattered. Worse, the hole she left was filled by another good employee, who then failed too, in a job nobody had written down either.
Willing is loud, capable is quiet
In an interview, willingness performs. Enthusiasm, energy, available to start tomorrow. It fills the room. Capability does not perform; it only shows up as evidence of having already done the thing. An interview left to run itself over-weights the loud signal, and an owner with a start date in two weeks takes it, because it is the one that is there.
Try this
On one page, write down what that seat owns, what it is allowed to decide without asking you, and the three numbers it will be judged on. If you cannot fill that page in, you have found the reason it keeps emptying. If you can, put it in front of the next candidate and ask for evidence they have already done each line.
Is Team the gear in the way?
The Ascent Scan scores Team against the other three and tells you whether the hiring problem is the constraint or a symptom of one. Free, six minutes.
Read the whole story of that hire, free →
More questions owners ask
- Why is my business profitable but I never have cash?
- What would I free up if customers paid me 30 days sooner?
- Which part of my business should I fix first?
- What should a small business measure every week?
- Is my business growing, or just getting busier?
- How do I know if a customer is costing me money?
- Why does every decision still come back to me?