While the list of things that keep founders up at night is long, I see very little that weighs on my clients like the burden of a sneakily growing payroll.
As they succeed in capturing new demand, they repeatedly have to re-strike the balance of when to hire the headcount to support their growing customer base. This requires careful attention to avoid both over-hiring (which prevents sales from keeping up with ballooning costs) and under-hiring (which results in sub-par product/service and thus bad retention, placing too much demand on sales).
Inevitably, every successful founder has this experience: their regular payroll hits and, for the first time, the sheer size of the number startles them. Holy shit that’s a big number, they tell me.
And while the choice to add staff is often obvious and necessary, the anxiety of not knowing whether those payroll dollars are providing the needed return to keep cash flow in check can be overwhelming.
The obvious answer? Ensure everyone is clear what the business needs from them to in return for those dollars.
Unfortunately, almost everyone’s first impulse is to use a tool that doesn’t do the trick: The Job Description. And even worse than not doing the trick, it creates a dangerous false belief that the trick has been done, leaving those six-to-seven figures of monthly payroll dollars free to drift away without the anchor of understanding how each role helps keep the business afloat.
Don’t get too worked up, I’m not saying Job Descriptions aren’t valuable. They’re actually essential as job ads and litigious risk mitigation tools. But for setting clear performance expectations? Afraid not, and here’s why:
A Job Description defines a “Role,” which is really just a label for a collection of related “Responsibilities.” We might even call the role the container and the responsibilities the things that we put in that container.
The problem is that those responsibilities are, themselves, empty containers, and do not actually clarify expectations until we fill them up with clear results. Let’s look at an example:
Your business is growing rapidly, so you need top talent to fill the roles you’re adding to service that growth. You hire a Recruiter (”Role”) and you think you’re giving them job clarity by writing the following responsibility into their Job Description:
Source and place high-quality candidates that are compatible with our company’s values and culture.
Is that solid expectation setting? Nope. Too many specifics left… unspecified, like:
Source how many high quality candidates per role?
How quickly should they be sourced?
How are we defining a “high-quality” candidate?
What’s our criteria for culture & values compatibility?
Without answers to these questions, the gap between their interpretations of the ambiguity and yours is not something your startup can afford.
Luckily, Job Descriptions can be useful as a starting point for clarifying expectations. Let’s stick with the Recruiter role to look at some examples:
Job Description Responsibility | Results Conversion |
Source and place high-quality candidates that are compatible with our company’s values and culture. | Achieve an average of 5 qualified candidates available for interviews identified within 2 weeks of each role’s approval-to-hire forms being signed. |
Oversee phone screenings, interviews, and schedule interviews with company management; facilitates next steps with candidates and managers. | Implement a hiring system, including supporting systems, tools and templates, that efficiently and reliably delivers our 5-qualified-candidates-within-2-weeks standard. |
Build a strong candidate pipeline through both internal and external relationships; source candidates that are both passively and actively seeking opportunities. | Implement a candidate pipeline system that proactively identifies 5 or more quality candidates for any roles that have historically opened for hire twice or more in any preceding 6 month period. |
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