You are hiring a job title, not a result

When should you hire, and who should you hire first?

It usually arrives as one question. You are stretched, the work is piling up, and someone has told you it is time to bring people on. So you open a blank document and start writing the ad.

Operations manager. Marketing coordinator. Office all-rounder. The title comes first because it is the easiest part to write, and everything after it is copied from ads you have seen before.

Six months later the person is doing exactly what the ad described, and the thing that was actually hurting the business is still hurting it. Almost every owner I meet has made that hire at least once.

Hire for the constraint, and write the scorecard first

The timing question has a plain answer. Hire when one specific constraint is costing you more than the salary would. Not when you feel busy. Busy is a mood. A constraint is something you can price.

Quotes going out a week late and losing the job. Invoices sitting unsent for a month. You turning down work because nobody else can run the site. Each of those has a number attached to it, and if the number is bigger than the wage, you are already paying for the hire. You are just paying the wrong person.

That same constraint answers the second question. The first hire is whoever removes it. Not the role a business your size is supposed to have — the one that fixes the thing that is actually costing you money.

Then, before you write a word of the ad, write the scorecard. It is one page and it holds three results this person must deliver in their first year, each with a way you will know:

1. The result. What is different in the business twelve months from now because they were here. Quotes out within forty-eight hours, not "manage the quoting process".
2. The measure. How you will see it without asking them. A report, a number, a date on a calendar.
3. The checkpoint. When you will look. Ninety days for the first sign, a year for the full answer.

Now write the ad from the scorecard, not from habit. Half the usual requirements fall away.

Most bad hires are made against a title. The title describes a seat. The scorecard describes a result. You can fill a seat with almost anyone. You can only fill a result with someone who can deliver it.

There is an honest weakness here. A scorecard cannot see character. It will tell you whether someone can get quotes out in forty-eight hours. It will not tell you whether they will be straight with you when they miss.

So do not try to make it. Keep character as a separate test, run separately — reference calls where you ask how the person behaved when something went wrong, and a paid trial task where you watch how they handle a problem you did not warn them about. The scorecard decides whether they can do the job. Character decides whether you want them doing it.

Netflix wrote the keeper test

In 2009, Reed Hastings and Patty McCord published the Netflix culture deck, a long slide presentation on how the company ran its people.

The slide that got the most attention was the keeper test. Managers were asked which of their people they would fight hard to keep if that person announced they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company. Anyone who did not pass was let go, with a generous payout. The deck put it bluntly: "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package."

Most people read that as the harshest line in the deck.

Read it as a firing rule and you have misread it. The keeper test is impossible to run unless the manager already knows what the seat has to deliver. You cannot tell adequate from excellent without first writing down what excellent is. The test is not really about the person. It is a statement about the role.

The severance is the visible part. The standard underneath it is the discipline. Netflix could only afford to be that blunt at the exit because it had been that precise about the result.

Why I do it this way

I write the scorecard first, and I have for a long time.

The clearest lesson came at board level. I chaired the board of an ASX-listed company and ran the search for its chief executive. A search like that does not start with a job title. Everyone already knows the title. It starts with what the business needs that person to have delivered by the time the board next has to account for them.

Get that part right and the shortlist sorts itself. Leave it vague and every candidate looks good in the room, because the room is judging the seat.

The same discipline works at any size. A chief executive and a first admin hire are the same exercise with different numbers on the page.

Do this before Wednesday

Before Wednesday, write down the one constraint that is costing your business the most right now, and put a rough dollar figure against it for a year.

If that figure is bigger than a salary, open a blank page and write the three results before you write the title. Do not open an old job ad.

If you cannot fill in three results, you are not ready to hire yet. You are ready to find out what is actually wrong.