Your Perfect Candidate Might Not Exist. Your Role May Be the Problem.

There is a point in some hiring processes when the search starts to feel almost impossible.

The business owner has a long list of requirements. They want someone who can manage the calendar, handle customer service, keep the books, coordinate projects, follow up with clients, manage social media, prepare reports, and generally take care of anything that needs attention.

They want someone experienced enough to work independently, flexible enough to handle changing priorities, organized enough to keep everything on track, and ideally already familiar with all the software the business uses.

Then they ask why it is so difficult to find the right candidate.

When a search keeps producing candidates who don’t seem to fit, it is worth looking at the role itself and asking whether the expectations have become too broad.

These are the roles where everything gets thrown in.

It usually doesn’t happen intentionally. A founder may start with a legitimate need for administrative support. Then they realize the person could also help answer customer emails. A few weeks later, there is a backlog of bookkeeping that needs attention. Then someone needs to update the CRM, schedule social media posts, follow up with leads, coordinate a project, or put together a report.

Because all of these tasks need to be done, adding them to the same role can seem reasonable.

Eventually, the original position has changed completely.

The business is now looking for one person to perform several different functions, often with very different skill sets and priorities. Yet the job is still presented as a single position, and the expectation remains that the right candidate should be able to handle all of it. At that point, the search starts becoming less about finding a strong candidate and more about finding someone who can somehow satisfy an increasingly broad set of expectations.

A long job description can look thorough, but length doesn’t necessarily mean the role has been clearly defined. When every task that needs attention gets added to the description, the list can become a record of everything the business is struggling to keep up with rather than a clear definition of what one person should own.

A business might genuinely need administrative support, bookkeeping, customer service, and marketing. The question is whether those responsibilities belong together in one role.

Some responsibilities may naturally belong together. Others may require completely different experience or working styles. Some may only take a few hours each week and could be handled through another resource. Others may be the core responsibility of the position and deserve most of the person’s attention.

Without separating those things, the hiring process becomes a search for a very unusual combination of skills. Good candidates can end up being eliminated because they are missing something that may not actually be central to the role.

Even if you find someone who can technically perform all of the responsibilities, the arrangement can still struggle if the role requires too many different kinds of work.

Imagine hiring someone whose background is primarily executive support and expecting them to spend a significant portion of their week doing bookkeeping. They may be capable of learning it, but they are also dividing their attention between two very different types of work.

Or consider someone with strong marketing experience who is hired into a role where marketing is only one responsibility among ten others. They may have the skills you wanted, but the actual job may not be what attracted them to the position.

This is one of the less obvious problems with kitchen-sink roles. The business can spend weeks searching for someone who meets the requirements, finally find that person, and still end up with a poor fit because the person was never really hired into a coherent role.

When conflicting expectations are built into the role, even a capable candidate can have difficulty succeeding in it.

Before starting a search, it is worth stepping away from the candidate entirely and looking at the work.

What does the business actually need this person to own?

Which responsibilities happen consistently enough to justify being part of the role? Which tasks are connected? Which require specialized experience? Which can be learned? Which are occasional? And which have simply been added because someone needs to do them?

This exercise can change the hiring decision.

Once the responsibilities are prioritized, the role may turn out to be fairly straightforward. In other cases, the exercise reveals that the business is actually trying to solve several different problems with one hire.

That is an important discovery to make before recruiting begins.

If the role itself is unclear, adding more candidates won’t solve the problem. You’ll simply have more people to compare against the same unclear set of expectations.

This is also where experience requirements need a closer look.

There is a tendency to treat every skill listed in a job description as equally important. In practice, they rarely are.

A candidate may need strong communication skills and significant experience with the primary responsibility of the role. They may not need five years of experience with every piece of software they will encounter. They may not need to arrive knowing every secondary task. Some things can be taught once the person understands the business and the expectations around the work.

A more useful question is whether the candidate has the foundation to take ownership of the work they are actually being hired to do, even if they haven’t performed every secondary task before.

That requires judgment from both the business and the recruiter. A candidate who is missing one teachable skill may be a much stronger hire than someone who checks every box but has little experience with the core responsibilities of the position.

Once the role has been properly defined, the candidate search becomes more focused. The recruiter has a clearer picture of what to look for, the client has a more realistic understanding of what a strong candidate should bring, and candidates have a better idea of what they would actually be responsible for if they accepted the position.

With a clearer role, candidate conversations can focus on how someone has handled the responsibilities that matter most. You can explore how they communicate, how they approach ownership, how they respond when priorities change, and how they are likely to work within the structure of the business.

Clearer roles also give candidates a more accurate picture of the opportunity. People should know what they are signing up for, particularly when the position involves several different areas of responsibility. A role that sounds like executive support but turns into bookkeeping, customer service, and marketing six months later is going to create frustration even if the original hire was highly capable.

Clear expectations give both sides a better chance of deciding whether the working relationship makes sense.

Hiring often creates pressure to move quickly. When a founder is overloaded and the work keeps piling up, there is a natural temptation to write the job description, start sourcing, and hope the right person appears.

But sometimes the most productive thing a recruiter can do is slow the process down long enough to understand the problem properly.

That means looking at the responsibilities, the priorities, the existing workflows, and the way the new person will actually fit into the business.

That may involve challenging a requirement that has been treated as essential, moving certain responsibilities to another role, or recognizing that the business needs two different kinds of support. In some cases, the right answer is simply to narrow the scope of the original position so the person can give proper attention to the responsibilities that matter most.

Having that conversation early can be uncomfortable, but it may prevent a much more expensive conversation later about why the person who was hired isn’t working out.

At Encore Global Team, this is part of what we look at before we begin searching for remote professionals. Understanding the role and the way it needs to function within the business gives us a much better foundation for evaluating candidates.

A better hiring decision starts with understanding the work well enough to find someone who can realistically succeed in the role.

Remote hiring makes role clarity even more important because the person joining the team will be working within your existing communication patterns, systems, priorities, and expectations from a distance.

If the role is unclear, that uncertainty doesn’t disappear when someone is hired. It follows them into the working relationship.

When responsibilities are defined properly, the person has a clearer understanding of what they own, the founder has a clearer understanding of what to expect, and the hiring process has a much better chance of producing a meaningful match.

A clearer hiring process starts with understanding what the business actually needs one person to own.

If you’re planning to hire remotely, we’d be happy to talk through the role, your workflows, and what you actually need the person to own before the search begins. You can reach us at info@encoreglobalteam.com.

A better hiring decision often starts with defining a better role.