Introduction

A while back I hired a creative strategist I was sure about. We ran the interviews properly, we checked what we thought needed checking, and she wanted the role as much as we wanted her in it. I was confident before she'd worked a single day.

A month in, it started to go wrong. We'd put her in one of our marketing pods, a small team that runs the same client accounts together, beside a growth strategist. One role was there to own the growth plan and the other to own the creative idea. That sounds like a clean split until you watch the work happen. Both people interpreted why the ads were working or weren't, and both thought they decided what got made next.

We had never put the two roles side by side and asked where one stopped and the other started. From the first weeks they were trying to own the same decisions, each certain those decisions belonged to them. The job she'd joined wasn't the job she'd understood she was accepting. I had checked the person and missed an important part of the job we were asking her to do.

I'm the VP of People and Culture at a marketing agency, so hiring is part of the work I'm meant to be good at. It took me a while to separate my disappointment with the result from a judgement about her. She could do creative strategy. What we hadn't established was how her work would fit beside the work already being done. A different division of responsibility might have helped, but that possibility doesn't turn the original decision into a good one.

This failure matters because it was ours to investigate. Calling it a personality clash would have let us avoid a harder question: what had we promised two people that they could each own? Nor could I call the discovery complete and blame everything that followed on onboarding. We had missed something before she started.

I've made hiring decisions with more confidence than the evidence deserved. The page looked strong, the conversation felt right, and I could explain why the person should succeed. What I couldn't always explain was what I'd checked about the work itself, or what would make me change my mind. That's the habit this book is about.

When hiring is your responsibility

If you lead people or operations in a small business, a hiring request can arrive as a decision already made. Someone needs an account manager, an operations lead or a replacement, and you are meant to find them. You know the pressure on the team. You may also suspect that the role will not solve the problem. Raising that doubt takes time when everyone is asking for a shortlist.

Then someone arrives who seems capable of taking the weight off. It's easy to start hoping before you've finished checking. You picture the team getting some relief and the client no longer asking when things will improve. That hope can make a plausible candidate feel like an answer to a question the business hasn't settled.

The consequences depend on the role and the business. A poor decision in a large company can do serious harm too. Small teams often have fewer people who can absorb missed work, and a founder may have no one to hand the problem to. A person responsible for a crucial client relationship or a difficult technical decision can affect far more than their share of the headcount.

The candidate has made a consequential decision as well. They may have left a job, turned down another offer or rearranged their life around conditions you described. When the actual work differs from the promise, both sides can discover the problem too late. Hiring well means taking their decision as seriously as your own.

This book is for people and operations leaders in agencies and small businesses. You may run hiring without controlling the budget, the founder's priorities or the work a manager will delegate. Recruiters and founders will recognise these decisions too. I want to help you investigate the work, challenge an unsupported demand and make a better recommendation, while being honest about which changes require someone else's agreement.

You don't need to agree with every argument I make. You do need a way to distinguish what you've learned from what you've assumed, and a process that gives you a reasonable chance of finding out when you're wrong.

What the page leaves out

A resume can tell you where someone has worked, what they say they did and which questions to ask next. It can help you check a qualification or find a relevant piece of experience. The mistake is giving that summary authority over a much larger question: whether this person can do the work your business needs, in the conditions you're actually offering.

The same title can describe very different jobs. One account manager inherits established clients, clear contracts and a team that can meet its promises. Another has to repair damaged relationships, challenge requests and negotiate priorities with a founder who changes direction. Experience in the first job may help with the second. It doesn't tell you, by itself, which parts will transfer or where the person will need support.

That is what I mean by context: the conditions in which the work gets done. Who can decide? What information is available? What has already been agreed with the client? Which colleagues make the work possible? What happens when two urgent requests conflict?

Ability still matters. A person cannot succeed at work they don't know how to do merely because the setting is pleasant. Conditions matter too, and a capable person can struggle when authority, expectations or support differ from what they understood. We need evidence about both. A list of skills is a start, not a complete account of either the person or the job.

In the strategist hire, we didn't need a more impressive resume. We needed to understand a decision that two existing role descriptions had each seemed to answer. That information was available in the business, but we hadn't brought it into the hiring decision.

Begin with the work

Hiring often starts when someone asks for a person. A manager needs another account manager. A founder needs an operations lead. A departing employee needs a replacement. The title gives everyone something familiar to search for, and the search can begin before anyone asks whether the familiar job is the one the business now needs.

I want you to pause at that point. What outcome is missing? What is preventing it? Is the obstacle a lack of capacity, a skill nobody has, a decision nobody owns or work that no longer needs doing? Adding a person can solve some of those problems. It can also put another person inside a problem you haven't solved.

If a hire is needed, describe the work before you describe the ideal candidate. Be specific about the decisions, the limits and the support. Then choose evidence that will help you judge whether someone can meet those requirements. Ask what the person needs from the role, explain what you can provide and take any gap seriously.

This takes effort. It doesn't require knowing everything before the first conversation, and it won't remove uncertainty. Some requirements become clearer only when candidates ask questions you hadn't considered. The discipline is to make those changes visible, revisit earlier decisions when necessary and apply the revised requirements fairly.

The process also continues after an offer. A promise about autonomy means little if the manager still approves every small decision. A role designed around client work will change if internal reporting takes over the week. Learning that something is wrong only helps when someone takes responsibility for changing it, or admits that it cannot change.

What this book promises

The opening chapters examine why familiar hiring signals can mislead us, why those habits persist and what a poor decision costs. Then we turn to understanding the work, designing a role and helping both sides make an informed choice. Work Drivers provide a way to talk about what people want from work, alongside evidence about what they can do.

Chapter 9 follows one invented hire through the hiring decision and offer. It shows why the business hires, how it resolves conflicting accounts of the role, how it narrows the field, what it asks candidates to do and how it weighs that evidence. The case is labelled as invented throughout.

The later chapters consider where AI can help and who remains responsible for decisions. Chapter 11 follows the invented hire's early working period, when the job may differ from what everyone expected. We finish with the team you're trying to build. A person can make colleagues' work easier or harder, but that doesn't turn people into a single score or make steady contribution a failure.

The printed toolkit contains the questions, completed teaching extracts and decision records needed to try the approach. It includes a choice not to hire, a fair work sample and a way to turn a post-hire discovery into an action with an owner and a review date. You don't need to buy our service to use those principles.

I've drawn on research where it speaks to the question, and on my own experience where that's what I have. Those are different kinds of evidence. A study of a particular hiring method doesn't validate every part of our process. A failure I've seen can show you a risk without proving how often it occurs. Where an idea is my belief or a hypothesis, I'll say so.

AI makes some of these distinctions more pressing. It can help write applications, organise evidence and conduct parts of an assessment. A polished answer may be easier to produce, but we remain responsible for deciding what it establishes. Whatever the tools become capable of, I believe understanding the work and checking the evidence will remain essential.

Your first move

Take the next role you expect to fill and write down the result it needs to produce. Then ask someone who depends on that work to describe a recent occasion when the result didn't happen. Compare their account with yours before you write the job ad.

You may find that the business needs a different person from the one requested, or that a new hire would need authority the manager intends to keep. Take that finding to the person who can decide. You have made useful progress if the next conversation is about that choice, rather than another list of candidates.

Kill the Resume is a challenge to a starting habit. It asks you to stop treating a person's summary of their past as the answer to a job you haven't yet understood. The background still has a place. The work gives it meaning.