Define the Job, Before Defining the Person – A Commonsense Idea for Hiring

There was an interesting article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “Microsoft CEO Search Reveals Board Rifts.” The big question was if Microsoft’s next CEO should be a product visionary or someone who can effectively manage a global business with dozens of moving parts. To me this is the wrong question; running the business and developing extraordinary products are both required. By defining the job before defining the person, the assessment then involves how the person hired would accomplish both tasks.

Earlier this year, I saw an ad for Facebook’s VP of Human Resources. It listed a bunch of experience requirements interlaced with some generic responsibilities and hyperbole. To me this is backwards. It’s far better to define the job before defining the person. If a person has successfully accomplished something similar, he or she has exactly the level of skills, experience and academics required. The worked required to be done determines the skills needed, the skills needed don't define the work required.

I’m amazed that 80-90% of the job descriptions listed on LinkedIn or found on Indeed.com still emphasize experience, skills and academics. Yet 80-90% of the people who get promoted internally into these same spots don’t have the experience, skills and academics listed as required for someone hired from the outside. What they have is something far better – a track record of performance that indicates they can take on a bigger role in the company. Not surprising, by assessing performance rather than skills, the probability of their success is more predictable, too. There is no reason the same performance-based process used for promoting people internally can’t be applied for external hires. It can, by defining the job before defining the person.

When I first became a recruiter in the late 1970s, the idea of using skills-infested job descriptions made no sense. It still makes no sense. Since I had a background in engineering and manufacturing, for those early assignments I’d just take a tour of the plant with the hiring manager and have the manager identify the things the person hired had to fix, improve or upgrade. Once these were defined, hiring managers had no problem agreeing to assess candidates based on their past performance accomplishing similar tasks. Not surprising, the people hired achieved the objectives as defined. More surprising, they all possessed enough of the skills and experiences required to do the work, but they were rarely in the mix or level described in the job description.

Over the next 30 years we successfully used this same concept for finding, assessing and hiring people in all types of jobs ranging from camp counselors at the YMCA, to mid- and senior management positions at companies of all sizes and in a variety of industries. The only common prerequisite to success in all of these assignments was the need to define the job before defining the person. In the late 1990s, the Gallup Group published their Q12 criteria for maximizing employee performance in First, Break All the Rules – What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. Number one on the list: clarify job expectations up front. Google recently “discovered” this same management secret as part of their Project Oxygen, defining what it took to be a great Google manager.

It seems obvious that if a company wants to hire people who are both competent and motivated to do the work required, they need to start by defining the work required. Yet somehow this basic concept is lost when a new job opens up. Instead of defining the job, managers focus on defining the person. The end result is not a job description at all, but a person description. This limits the selection pool to a narrow group of people just like the people the company has hired in the past. By default, this precludes expanding the company’s diversity hiring program or raising the company’s overall talent level.

The common excuse for retaining the status quo is compliance: the government makes us do it. This is hogwash. As part of the research for my latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, I asked one of the top labor attorney’s in the country, David Goldstein from Littler Mendelson, to review the idea of using performance objectives to define the job, rather than skills. Here are a few of his comments (you’ll find his full report in the book):

By creating compelling job descriptions that are focused on key performance objectives, by using advanced marketing and networking concepts to find top people, by adopting evidence-based interviewing techniques, and by integrating recruiting into the interviewing process, companies can attract better candidates and make better hiring decisions.

A properly prepared performance profile can identify and document the essential functions of a job better than traditional position descriptions, facilitating the reasonable accommodation of disabilities and making it easier to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar laws.

Focusing on “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria may open the door to more minority, military, and disabled candidates who have a less “traditional” mix of experiences, thereby supporting affirmative action or diversity efforts.

Hiring a more diverse and talented workforce starts by defining the work required for success, not the skills, experiences and academics needed to do the work. This is not rocket science, just commonsense, but apparently commonsense is not one of the skills required for hiring people.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), covers the performance-based process described in this article in more depth. For instant hiring advice join Lou's LinkedIn group and follow his Wisdom About Work series on Facebook.