Effective Hiring - How To Scope And Find Ideal Candidates

I cringed when I read this job description:

"Looking for 10+ years of experience, strong leadership skills, and excellent communication abilities."

Another vanilla posting destined to attract mediocre candidates.

Three months and 127 interviews later, the role was still unfilled. They'd churned through two recruiters and countless team hours, drowning in a sea of underwhelming resumes.

Most companies treat hiring like throwing darts blindfolded—posting job descriptions and then wading through hundreds of applications, praying to find the perfect candidate.

A Better Way

Last year, I watched a friend's company upend this conventional wisdom. They had their executive assistant do the initial heavy lifting of finding and qualifying candidates through two methods:

1. Reverse engineering from A+

They worked with their assistant to dissect LinkedIn profiles. For each role, she mapped the career trajectories of 15-20 people crushing it at companies they admired. Not just scanning titles — but excavating the patterns and specific experience.

The observations were insightful.

Take their Head of Sales search. The most successful leaders followed a distinct path:

• 2-3 years personally closing enterprise deals, cutting their teeth in the groundwork
• 18-24 months leading small teams
• Then scaling to larger organizations with more complexity

Sometimes there was a straightforward trajectory in a role, but many times there are multiple paths to success that need to be mapped out.

As an example using Brand Marketing, it may look something like this…

Path 1: Agency route

• 2-5 years cutting their teeth at marketing agencies, doing brand work across multiple industries and companies
• Progress from account executive to creative director
• More client variety, faster execution cycles
• More mental models, advise implementation (limited hands-on experience)

Path 2: CPG brand management

• Start in brand management; more General Management in nature
• Focus on P&L ownership
• Deeper strategic planning, work across multiple stakeholders, fewer but larger campaigns
• Fewer mental models, deep implementation

Understanding these different paths helped them evaluate candidates more effectively, weighing the trade-offs of each background. For example:

• Finding someone with mostly an agency background would likely lead to strong core brand skills, but potentially less implementation experience working across a variety of stakeholders.
• Finding someone who spent most of their career in CPG brand management would likely lead to stronger business implementation and acumen, but they may be used to working with longer planning cycles and may find a fast-moving start-up to be a challenging transition.

2. Searching for wildcards, but systematically

But the real magic happened when their assistant also unearthed the wildcards – those who carved unconventional paths to success. They started allocating 10-20% of the candidate pool to these “higher risk, higher upside” candidates. They looked for the underlying skills and experience, even in seemingly unrelated fields.

A Head of Engineering who emerged from management consulting. A Chief Marketing Officer who cut their teeth in journalism.

While it’s difficult to find wildcards with demonstrated experience, they: 1) reserved a portion of the candidate pool to try to recruit passive candidates who are currently in the role at another company; 2) made room for some candidates with wildly impressive experience that wasn’t traditional but perhaps had strong experience in adjacent areas.

Lastly, to further evaluate wildcards, they did extensive case interviewing to complement this higher risk tactic.

One measures time served. The other measures impact delivered.

This inverts the traditional hiring playbook. Rather than posting and praying, you're armed with a precise blueprint of what excellence looks like in action.

To summarize:

• Study the career patterns of top performers and map them out with your assistant. It may take a few cycles to transfer industry and role-specific knowledge, but it’s worth the time
• Map out multiple paths to success and understand trade-offs
• Make room for wildcards - look for proof of impact over time served
• Let your assistant do the heavy lifting of pattern-matching once the profiles have been identified