Hire for the Work You Have, Not the Title You Want
TACT Marketing Strategy
Most hiring mistakes we see in founder-led companies happen before the job post ever goes live. The founder feels stretched and picks a title that sounds like relief. A few months later, the new hire is busy, yet the founder is just as stretched as before.
The problem is rarely the person. It is the role. It was written from a feeling instead of from the work.
‘Wants’ Sound Like Titles, ‘Needs’ Sound Like Tasks
“I need a marketing manager.” “I need an operations person.” Those are wants. They describe the relief you are hoping to feel.
A need sounds different. Client follow-ups slip every week because nobody owns them. Proposals go out late because the numbers live in four different places. Each of those is specific enough to count. That is the test. A role you cannot describe in recurring tasks is a role you are not ready to post.
Audit Before You Advertise
The most useful step before any hire is also the least glamorous one: track the work for two weeks. Every task that would belong to the role you are considering gets logged, along with who did it and roughly how long it took.
An audit usually lands on one of two answers. Sometimes the work adds up to a real role, and now you can describe it in plain terms a candidate understands. Other times the work turns out to be a process problem wearing a staffing costume, and a better system solves it for a fraction of the cost of a salary.
Some of the Work Should Not Be a Person
That second answer is more common than most founders expect. Reminders, status checks, routing a task to the right owner, chasing an approval: a lot of what feels like a coordinator's job is really a missing system.
This fall I moved a large share of TACT's check-in and follow-up work out of my head and into a structured review that runs at the end of each day and only surfaces what needs my decision. The point was not to avoid hiring. The point was to find out what was left over once the system carried its share. What is left over is the role worth hiring for.
One Title Can Hide Two Jobs
Titles bundle skills that do not always belong together. Content is a good example. Writing a sharp social caption and writing a long-form article that holds a reader for eight hundred words are different crafts. Plenty of talented people are excellent at one and average at the other.
When a role bundles skills like that, decide which one is load-bearing and hire for it first. For writing roles at our size, the filter is writing quality, every time. Software can be learned in a few weeks. Judgment about what to say, and how to say it, takes years.
Signs You Hired for a Want
The new hire keeps asking what they should be working on. That usually means the role was a title without a task list behind it.
You are still reviewing everything that crosses their desk. That usually means the work you needed off your plate was never clearly handed over, because it was never clearly defined.
Neither sign means you hired the wrong person. Both mean the role needs to be rebuilt from the work up, and that is fixable.
Start with the Work
Before your next job post, write down the ten tasks you most want off your plate and how often each one happens. Cross off anything a better process could handle. Whatever survives that list is your job description, and it will attract better candidates than any title ever could.
TACT works with founder-led B2B companies that have outgrown doing everything themselves and want growth that does not depend on adding headcount by gut feel. We help you clarify what your marketing actually needs, and who or what should carry it.
When your team feels stretched, and the obvious answer is another hire, it is worth an hour to check that instinct first. Book a free Discovery Call with TACT CEO Chelsie Wyse, and review the work together before you write the job post.
