Rethinking the Work Before Beginning the Search
A position opens, and someone retrieves the last job description.
The document is revised, circulated among stakeholders, and expanded to reflect everything the organization hopes the next employee might accomplish. New responsibilities are added. Old requirements remain because no one is certain whether they can safely be removed. Preferred credentials become mandatory. The experience of the previous incumbent quietly becomes the model for the next one.
By the time the role reaches the market, the organization appears to have defined what it needs.
Often, it has only produced a more polished description of what it already knows.
A job description can document reporting relationships, responsibilities, qualifications, and compensation classification. What it cannot do automatically is determine whether those elements still reflect the work the organization needs performed. Yet once the document is approved, it begins governing the entire hiring process: recruiters source against it, screening systems filter for it, interviewers evaluate candidates through it, and qualified people are rejected for failing to resemble the theory of the role embedded within it.
The result is a peculiar form of precision. An organization can run a disciplined, consistent, carefully documented search for the wrong person.
A vacancy is information, not merely an instruction to replace
When someone leaves, the default organizational response is usually replacement. The title existed, the budget existed, and the work must go somewhere. Opening the requisition feels like the practical next step.
But a vacancy is also one of the few moments when an organization can examine a role without being constrained by the person currently occupying it. Before asking who should fill the position, leaders should ask what the departure reveals.
What work had the role actually come to include? Which responsibilities had quietly migrated elsewhere? What remained undone? Where did the employee struggle because the role was poorly designed, under-resourced, or internally contradictory? Which contributions proved unusually valuable even though they never appeared in the official description? And has the business changed enough that replacing the same title would preserve a structure that no longer serves it?
Exit interviews can be unusually valuable here, provided they are treated as operational evidence rather than a final administrative ritual. A departing employee may be able to identify competing priorities, missing authority, repetitive bottlenecks, invisible labor, or responsibilities that could be redistributed more sensibly. That account should not be accepted uncritically, but neither should it disappear into a file after the employee leaves.
The correct outcome of vacancy analysis is not always a replacement. It may be an internal promotion, a redesigned role, two narrower roles, a shift in reporting relationships, investment in a different capability, or a decision that the old position is no longer necessary. Automatically refilling the position answers the easiest question—who replaces this person—before the organization has asked the more important one: what does the business need now?
The people closest to the work are often missing from the analysis
Job descriptions are frequently written by people who do not encounter the role’s daily reality. Human resources may own the document. A department head may approve it. A senior leader may add strategic expectations. Each may understand part of the position, but none necessarily sees how work reaches the role, where it stalls, which relationships make it possible, or what colleagues have learned to compensate for.
Organizations nevertheless often begin with existing documentation and performance data rather than interviewing the people who possess the richest operational knowledge: current employees.
That inquiry should extend beyond anyone who holds the same title. It should include the manager, peers, direct reports, internal clients, and people performing adjacent work. Those employees can identify where handoffs fail, which capabilities are genuinely scarce, what the written process omits, and which parts of the job require judgment rather than procedural compliance.
They can also expose two different kinds of blind spot. The first is where the previous employee had room to improve the role: work that was routinely delayed, relationships that remained weak, or capabilities the organization needed but never received. The second is where the previous employee expanded the role through strengths that were never formally recognized. Perhaps that person translated effectively between technical and commercial teams, stabilized a difficult client relationship, mentored junior employees, or saw emerging risks earlier than others. If those contributions mattered, the organization must decide whether they belong in the redesigned role—not simply lose them because they were absent from the old document.
This is the practical purpose of job analysis. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management describes it as examining the tasks performed, the competencies required to perform them, and the relationship between the two. The relevant knowledge comes from people with direct, current experience of the work. The job description should be an output of that inquiry, not its starting assumption.
The incumbent is evidence, not the template
The person who previously held a role inevitably shapes how the organization understands it. Their strengths become associated with the position. Their limitations may cause work to move elsewhere. Their background begins to look like the natural route into the job.
That history is useful, but it is not a neutral specification.
Hiring in the image of a successful predecessor can preserve valuable capability. It can also prevent the organization from seeing how the role should evolve. Hiring against an unsuccessful predecessor creates the opposite danger: the search becomes an exercise in finding someone unlike the last person, even when the problem involved unclear authority, conflicting expectations, weak management, or an impossible span of responsibility.
In either case, the organization risks confusing a person’s performance with the design of the role itself.
A better review separates four questions: What did the previous employee do? What should the role have required? What does the organization need next? And which conditions must exist for the next person to succeed? Those answers may overlap, but they should never be assumed to be identical.
The organization must look beside the vacancy, not only into it
Roles do not operate as isolated boxes on an organizational chart. Work crosses boundaries, accumulates in informal places, and changes as technology, customers, regulations, strategy, and team capability change. A vacancy therefore cannot be understood by examining only the empty box.
Leaders should look at adjacent roles before authorizing a replacement. Has another employee already developed the capability to assume the work? Is that person performing much of it without the title, authority, or compensation? Could responsibilities be redistributed in a way that creates a legitimate internal advancement opportunity? Have two roles evolved toward substantial overlap? Is the vacancy revealing a missing capability elsewhere rather than a need to recreate the departed position?
This wider view can uncover internal candidates who would be invisible in an external search. It can also prevent a common organizational mistake: hiring externally for a role that an existing employee is already demonstrating the capacity to perform, while leaving that employee responsible for training the newcomer.
Internal hiring is not automatically the correct answer. Moving work among existing employees can become disguised understaffing, and promotions should not be offered without appropriate authority, compensation, and support. The point is not to avoid external recruitment. It is to understand the system before deciding which intervention it requires.
A title is not cosmetic in an algorithmic labor market
Even when the work has been defined correctly, the wrong title can sabotage the search.
Titles have always communicated level, function, and professional identity. Today they also act as discovery infrastructure. Job boards, search engines, recruiting platforms, and recommendation systems use titles and profile histories to decide which opportunities candidates see and which candidates recruiters are shown. A title that is idiosyncratic, inflated, outdated, or misaligned with the market can route the opportunity toward the wrong audience before anyone reads the description.
This matters especially when internal language differs from external convention. A title that makes perfect sense inside one company may describe a different function everywhere else. Conversely, retaining a familiar title because “that is what the role has always been called” may conceal that the job has moved into a new discipline, level, or scope.
Choosing a title therefore requires both internal and external analysis. Internally, it should represent the role’s authority, accountability, and relationship to adjacent positions. Externally, it should use language that qualified people recognize and that modern search and recommendation systems can interpret accurately. The title is not merely the label placed on a finished job description. It is one of the mechanisms that determines who encounters the opportunity at all.
A grocery list of skills is not a theory of success
Many job descriptions become inventories of qualifications: a degree, a number of years, industry experience, software familiarity, communication skills, strategic thinking, leadership, and an assortment of preferred attributes. The longer the list, the more rigorous the role appears.
But a list of skills does not explain what the person is being hired to change.
The better starting point is the business problem. What is currently happening that must improve? What outcomes should exist after six months or a year? Which obstacles are technical, which are structural, and which depend on relationships or influence? What must the person know upon entry, and what can a capable person learn?
This distinction matters because capability is contextual. The candidate who satisfies every visible requirement may still be poorly suited to the actual environment. A person can possess the nominal communication skill while being unable to build trust with this team, translate between these stakeholders, or deliver unwelcome information to this leadership group. Another candidate may lack one preferred credential while possessing precisely the judgment, adaptability, and credibility the situation requires.
That does not justify returning to intuition, chemistry, or an undefined notion of culture fit. Communication and interpersonal requirements should be made more specific, not less. Does the role require resolving conflict between technical and commercial teams? Influencing leaders without formal authority? Communicating risk to a skeptical board? Managing people through substantial change? Those are assessable demands. “Excellent communication skills” is mostly a phrase.
Hiring is not improved by abandoning requirements. It is improved by tracing requirements back to the work.
Selection rigor cannot rescue an inaccurate role
The consequences of a weak job definition extend through every stage of hiring.
Recruiters search for the wrong profile. Applicant-tracking systems filter against outdated language. Interviewers ask structured questions about competencies that are no longer central. Assessments measure what the document says rather than what the work requires. Compensation is benchmarked against a title that may not describe the actual scope. Candidates receive conflicting accounts of the position because stakeholders never resolved their differences before the search began.
The process can still look exemplary. It can be standardized, documented, efficient, and consistent. None of those qualities establishes that the organization is measuring the right things.
Employment-selection guidance reflects this connection. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission advises employers to ensure that selection procedures are job-related, properly validated for their intended positions and purposes, and updated when job requirements change. A hiring method cannot be meaningfully job-related if the employer is working from an obsolete or inaccurate account of the job.
Technology magnifies the consequence. The more efficiently a platform matches candidates to a faulty description, the faster the organization excludes people who could solve the real problem. Artificial intelligence may improve drafting, sourcing, matching, or assessment, but it cannot decide which inherited assumptions deserve to survive. If the organization gives it the wrong theory of the role, it can operationalize that theory at scale.
Define the work before defining the candidate
A useful job description should be the final expression of a discovery process. Before drafting it, the organization should be able to answer several questions:
- Why does this role need to exist now?
- What business problem or opportunity is it expected to address?
- What outcomes should the person produce in the first six to twelve months?
- What work is actually essential to those outcomes?
- What has changed since the role was last filled?
- What did the previous employee contribute that the document failed to capture?
- Where did the role, its design, or its surrounding system create preventable difficulty?
- What do the manager, peers, direct reports, and internal clients know about the work?
- Could an internal employee assume the role with appropriate development, authority, and compensation?
- Should adjacent roles or reporting relationships change before the vacancy is filled?
- Which capabilities must exist on entry, and which can be learned?
- Which credentials are genuinely necessary, and which are merely familiar proxies?
- What title will accurately communicate the work to both people and algorithmic systems?
Only after those questions have been answered does it make sense to describe the candidate. Even then, the goal is not to imagine a flawless person. It is to identify the evidence that would demonstrate an ability to perform the work in this environment.
The distinction is consequential. When organizations begin with the candidate profile, they tend to reproduce prior patterns: the same titles, backgrounds, credentials, and industries. When they begin with the work and its intended outcomes, they create room to recognize transferable capability, unconventional experience, and internal potential.
The job description should describe a decision the organization has actually made
A job description cannot compensate for unresolved strategy. If leaders disagree about the role’s priorities, authority, level, resources, or definition of success, polishing the language will not make the job coherent. It will merely transfer the ambiguity to recruiters and candidates.
The strongest candidates often detect that ambiguity quickly. They ask which problem takes priority, who owns the decision, why the previous person left, how success will be measured, and whether the resources match the expectations. Their questions may appear challenging because they expose decisions the organization has postponed. That challenge can itself be valuable evidence—particularly in executive, transformation, turnaround, and newly created roles, where the person hired may need to revise the organization’s original understanding of the problem.
The job description is not the job. It is a claim about the job: what matters, what success requires, and why a particular combination of work belongs together. Before using that claim to attract, screen, assess, and reject people, an organization should know how it arrived there.
Otherwise, it may spend months searching for the perfect candidate to fill a role that exists only on paper.
Sources
U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “Job Analysis.” https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/assessment-and-selection/job-analysis/
U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “Assessment and Selection.” https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/assessment-and-selection/
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Employment Tests and Selection Procedures.” https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-selection-procedures
U.S. Department of Labor, O*NET. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/onet
By Melissa Brandt | Melissa Brandt & Associates