A job description is not enough to hire well because it lists the duties of a seat without ever describing the person who succeeds in it. CPG Recruitment has run searches across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, and the most common reason a search stalls is that the client sent over a duty list and called it a hiring profile. A duty list says nothing about what good looks like, what the seat has to produce, or which two or three things a person cannot be missing. Until those are written down, every interview is a group of people guessing separately.
What does a job description actually tell you?
It tells you the shape of the work and almost nothing about the shape of the person. Responsibilities, reporting lines, a tools list, a years-of-experience number, a paragraph of culture boilerplate. All of it true, none of it discriminating — it describes hundreds of people equally well. It is the hiring equivalent of walking onto a car lot and asking for a car with four wheels, an engine and air conditioning. Every vehicle qualifies. The salesperson can hand you anything and be technically correct, and you drive away with something that meets the spec and fails the need.
What narrows the lot is the second set of questions: how many people ride in it, what the winter is like where you park, what you will give up to stay under budget. Most hiring teams never reach that second set before the job goes live.
What is the unwritten wish list on a hiring team?
It is the private set of criteria each person on the hiring team is scoring against without having told anyone. The hiring manager wants someone who will not need managing on weekends. The department head wants someone who will not disrupt a team that is finally settled. The finance lead wants someone who lands under the range. None of these are unreasonable. All of them are invisible, and invisible criteria cannot be met on purpose.
Our job in week one is to drag those lists into the open and reconcile them into one written profile. That step is the reason we brought average time-to-fill down from 68 days to 37. Nothing about the sourcing got faster — the decisions stopped being re-litigated at every stage.
Why does the same resume look different to three reviewers?
Because with no agreed standard, each reviewer scores the resume against their own wish list and reaches a defensible conclusion that contradicts the others. One sees someone who has scaled a team from four to twenty and calls it exactly right. The second sees someone who has never worked in a company this small and calls it a culture risk. The third sees eleven years against a posting that said seven and calls it a comp problem. Same two pages. The disagreement is not about the candidate — it is about a standard that was never set.
It is also why teams lose candidates at the final stage. The unspoken criteria surface at the offer conversation, the most expensive possible moment to discover them.
What should you define instead of a duty list?
Define outcomes, predictive experience, two to three non-negotiables, and the trade-offs you accept — in that order. Outcomes come first because they are the only part of the profile that can be checked against reality later. Not “manage the inbound pipeline” but “inbound response under four hours and a qualified-meeting rate the sales team stops complaining about, within ninety days.” An outcome written that plainly can be interviewed for and measured. A duty cannot. How the four pieces fit together, and who signs off on each, is the work of building an ideal candidate profile before anything goes live.
What experience actually predicts success in a seat?
The experience that predicts success is experience solving the specific problem this seat exists to solve, at roughly this stage and scale — not a years number and not an industry label. A controller who has taken a company through its first external audit is predictive for a company facing its first external audit. Fifteen years of steady-state controllership is not, even though it reads as more experience on paper. Our clients across 25+ industries rarely need someone from their own industry. They need someone who has already survived the problem in front of them. This is where credential filters do the most damage, and the practical case for skills-based over degree-based hiring: the proxy shrinks the pool without improving the odds.
How many non-negotiables should a role have?
Two or three, and they have to be things you would genuinely reject an otherwise excellent candidate over. A list of nine non-negotiables is not a high standard — it is an unexamined wish list wearing a strict label, and it produces a search with no viable candidates and a team that blames the market. When we force a client to cut the list to three, the argument that follows is the most useful hour of the search: the first time the group has ranked its own priorities out loud.
What trade-offs should be agreed before interviews start?
Agree in advance what you will give up: seniority for hunger, industry familiarity for problem familiarity, polish for coachability, or budget for speed. Every real search forces one of these. The only question is whether the team decides it deliberately in week one or accidentally in week nine with a candidate waiting on an answer. Founder Christian Saab, a TEDx speaker who started CPG Recruitment in March 2020, makes the same point in his account of why companies keep hiring the wrong person: undecided trade-offs get made by whoever is most tired.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should we stop writing job descriptions entirely?
No. A job description is a public advertisement and a compliance document, and you still need one. The mistake is using it as the internal hiring standard. Write the description for the market and the profile for the hiring team, and keep them separate.
Who should own the candidate profile?
One named person, normally the hiring manager. Others contribute criteria, but a single owner reconciles them and has final say on the written version. Profiles owned by a committee get rewritten silently at every stage.
How long should a candidate profile be?
One page. Outcomes at ninety days, six months and one year, the predictive experience, two or three non-negotiables, and the agreed trade-offs. If it runs longer than a page, it has drifted back into a duty list.
Can the profile change mid-search?
Yes, and it often should once the market gives you real data. The rule is that it changes in writing, on purpose, with everyone informed — not quietly in one reviewer’s head between interviews.
If your last search produced a shortlist nobody could agree on, the profile was the problem, not the pipeline. Talk to CPG Recruitment about your next hire and we will build the written profile before a single candidate is contacted — which is most of what a recruiter actually does beyond sending resumes. If you have a role open now, contact CPG Recruitment and we will start with the profile.