Organization Design

Defining a Role Before You Hire for It

Before a single candidate sees the job, write the document that makes every later hiring decision mechanical: the outcomes the role owns, the calls it may make alone, and the bar at twelve months.

  • Intermediate
  • 16 min total
  • 14 chapters

What decision this helps you make: Whether the role you are about to post is one job or two, what it is actually allowed to decide, and what evidence would tell you in month nine that the hire worked.

What this topic is

A role definition is a short internal document, finished before the job is advertised, that states four things: the outcomes this person owns, the decisions they may make without asking anyone, what good looks like at twelve months in numbers you can actually observe, and the constraints and interfaces they have to work inside. It is not the job advert and it is not the HR job description. Those are outputs. This is the specification they are written from.

Why it matters

Every downstream hiring activity is measurement, and measurement needs a standard. Without the document you cannot build a structured interview, because there are no criteria to score against. You cannot take a useful reference, because you do not know what to ask about. You cannot onboard, because there is no thirty-day outcome. You cannot performance-manage, because nothing was agreed. The vagueness does not stay in the job posting. It becomes a person whose manager is disappointed for reasons neither of them can name.

Who should learn it

Founders about to make their first hire in a function, managers backfilling a departure, anyone who has ever written "and other duties as required" and meant it, and second-line managers reviewing role definitions their own managers wrote.

What you will understand

  • The four components a role definition has to carry, and why outcomes are not responsibilities
  • How to test whether you are looking at one role or two, with arithmetic rather than instinct
  • Why decision rights belong in the document and are the part everybody omits
  • How to read an inherited job description and find what it quietly commits you to

Prerequisites

Common misconception

"We will work out the details once we see who is available." This sounds pragmatic and it is the single most expensive habit in hiring. Shaping the role around the candidate means the standard moves with the sample, so whoever interviews last, or interviews best, defines the job. You then discover in month seven that the role you actually needed was never the role you filled. And because nothing was written down, the disagreement about whether the hire is working out has no evidence on either side. The second misconception is that the document is for the candidate. It is for you. The candidate gets a much shorter version.