Hire for strengths before you write the job description

When a growing business needs to hire, the process usually starts the same way. Someone finds an old job description, or copies one from the internet, updates the title and posts it. The candidates who apply are matched against a list of tasks and years of experience. The best interviewee gets the offer.

Then, a few months later, the founder wonders why the new manager is struggling. The person is capable. They meet most of the listed requirements. Yet something does not fit. In our work with established businesses, the reason is often that the seat was never properly designed in the first place.

Job descriptions describe tasks, not success

A typical job description lists duties: manage the team, prepare reports, handle key accounts, coordinate with operations. It says very little about what kind of person thrives in that seat, or what that person will need around them to succeed.

Two candidates can both be able to do every listed task. One builds relationships easily and dislikes detailed analysis. The other loves data and finds client entertaining exhausting. Put the wrong one in a seat that is really about relationships, and they will do the tasks without creating the result.

Start with the Strengthprint

We use the term Strengthprint for the pattern of a person's natural strengths: what they do well, what energises them, and where they produce their best results with the least friction. It is different from a CV, which tells you where someone has been, and different from a job description, which tells you what the business wants done.

Before hiring, ask what Strengthprint the seat actually needs. Is it someone who opens doors, or someone who builds systems? Someone who moves fast and improvises, or someone who brings order and consistency? Being specific here changes who you shortlist and what you ask in interviews.

Design the seat around the strengths it needs, then find the person, not the other way round.

Then define the Supportprint

No one is strong at everything, and pretending otherwise sets people up to fail. The Supportprint describes the support a seat needs around it: the tools, people, processes and decisions that cover the areas outside the core strengths.

Imagine a manufacturer hiring a business development head with a strong commercial Strengthprint. The Supportprint might include a sales coordinator who handles quotations and follow-ups, a clear pricing approval process, and a CRM that is actually kept up to date. Without that support, the new hire spends half the week on administration and the business pays senior salary for junior work.

KAR and SAR: making responsibility clear

Two simple ideas bring the Strengthprint and Supportprint together:

• KAR, key area of responsibility: the one outcome this seat owns and is measured on. It should match the person's Strengthprint closely.
• SAR, support area of responsibility: the areas where this person contributes to someone else's outcome, or where others support them. These are real responsibilities, but not the main one.

When every seat has a single, clear KAR, people know what they are accountable for and leaders know whom to ask. When SARs are written down, the hidden work that falls between roles stops falling through the gaps.

Hiring ahead of growth

Scaling businesses often need to hire before the work fully arrives. A new region, a new product line or a new channel needs someone in place to build it. This is exactly when copied job descriptions are most dangerous, because the seat does not exist yet and no one is sure what it will become.

A practical sequence helps:

1. Name the outcome: what will this seat have delivered in its first year if it works well?
2. Define the KAR: write the single area this person will own, in one sentence.
3. Describe the Strengthprint: list the three or four strengths that most predict success in that KAR.
4. Design the Supportprint: decide what support, tools and decision rights the seat will have from day one.
5. Write the SARs: agree where this seat helps others and where others help it.
6. Only then write the advert: the job description becomes a summary of the design, not a substitute for it.

What this changes for existing teams

The same approach works for people already in the business. Many family businesses and founder-led companies have loyal, capable people sitting in seats that do not fit their Strengthprint, often because the role grew around them over years. A strong operations person may have been pushed into managing sales. A brilliant client manager may be buried in reporting.

Mapping Strengthprints across the existing team often shows that the business does not need as many new hires as it thought. It needs some people in different seats, with better support around them. That is usually faster, cheaper and kinder than replacing anyone.

It also reduces some of the human friction that slows growing teams: the sense of unfairness when roles are unclear, the frustration of doing work you are not suited to, and the quiet competition between people whose responsibilities overlap.

Where to start

Before your next hire, pause before opening the old job description. Spend an hour defining the KAR, the Strengthprint, the Supportprint and the SARs for that seat. Then look at your current team through the same lens.

If you would like help mapping this across your organisation, our complimentary one-week Revenue Review includes a look at whether the people closest to revenue are in the seats that suit their strengths, and gives you a ninety-day plan to act on, whether or not we work together.