One of the most expensive mistakes in hiring is not a lack of people.
It is a role that never really got pinned down properly.
I see this a lot. Someone knows they need to hire, so the brief gets opened up to everyone with a view. It starts out looking thorough, which is usually why the problem hangs around for longer than it should. There are lots of notes, lots of opinions and usually a long list of things the person “must” have. On paper, it feels detailed. In reality, it is often just a bit messy.
That matters because the market can feel it.
If the role is unclear, the shortlist will be too.
Candidates are usually quicker to pick up on this than the people running the process. The remit sounds wider than it should, the expectations feel bigger than the support and the job starts to look as if it is still being built while the search is already live. At that point, people are not only judging the opportunity. They are also judging whether the business has actually decided what it wants.
That is where searches start to wobble.
The obvious cost is time, but the real cost is usually quality. Once the brief is loose, the process gets more political. People start protecting their own version of the job. Trade-offs soften. The remit grows arms and legs. What started as a sensible search can end up rewarding compromise instead of clarity.
Strong candidates notice that. They may not say no straight away, but they can see when a role is still being negotiated behind the scenes while the market is being asked to treat it as fixed.
That is especially obvious in industrial businesses. Plant leadership, commercial leadership, regional leadership, functional heads — these are not paper jobs. They sit close to pressure. If the brief is vague, the person gets asked to define success for themselves while also carrying the consequences of a role the business never properly defined.
That is not fair on the candidate, and it is not especially smart for the business either.
The better hiring teams I come across tend to do the hard thinking early. They know what the role is there to fix. They know what cannot move. They know what the first six months need to prove. That sort of clarity can feel slower up front, but it usually saves time once the search is live because the market can actually respond to something real.
Under-briefed roles can feel democratic because everyone gets a voice. But a room full of voices is not the same thing as a proper brief. If nobody is willing to narrow the job down to what really matters, you end up with something too broad to help anyone.
At that point, the shortlist is not really a market view. It is an internal compromise wearing a market hat.
That should worry people more than it often does.
A proper brief does not need to be long. It needs to be sharp. It should say what the role is actually for. It should make the difference between essential and desirable very obvious. It should show where the decision sits. And it should give the search enough direction to assess the market properly without inventing the job on the client’s behalf.
If the market has to guess what success looks like, it usually does. And that guess is rarely generous.
I do not think the problem is that businesses are suddenly asking for too much. I think a lot of them are still not as clear as they need to be. And in hiring, clarity still beats volume.
The best candidates are not usually put off by a hard role. They are put off by a role that has not been thought through properly enough to feel credible.
That is the real cost.
