When a role becomes vacant, the natural response is to replace it.
A job description is written, a salary is agreed, the recruitment process begins and the focus quickly becomes:
“Who can we get into this role?”
But for businesses going through growth, transformation or change, there is a bigger question worth asking:
Are we filling a role, or are we building a team capable of taking the business where it needs to go?
There is a significant difference.
And increasingly, it is a question leadership teams should be asking before they start their next search.
The danger of simply replacing people
Replacing an outgoing employee with someone who has done an almost identical job can feel like the safest option.
If someone has left after five years, why wouldn't you look for someone with similar experience, in a similar company, doing a similar role?
The problem is that businesses rarely stand still.
The customer landscape changes. New channels emerge. Businesses acquire brands, enter new markets, restructure teams and change strategy. Commercial priorities evolve and leadership teams often find themselves asking their people to operate in ways they haven't previously had to.
The capabilities required from a team today may therefore be very different from those required two or three years ago.
Yet hiring processes often start with an existing job description and an assumption that the next person should look similar to the last.
That can result in businesses hiring for experience rather than capability.
The candidate may tick every box on the specification, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the right person for the business's next phase.
Start with the business problem
Before starting a search, leadership teams should step back and ask:
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Perhaps the business needs to accelerate growth.
Perhaps it needs to improve commercial performance, develop a stronger customer strategy, build a new category capability or prepare for an acquisition.
Perhaps the existing team is strong operationally but lacks strategic leadership.
These are fundamentally different hiring challenges.
The answer should influence who you hire.
The best candidate isn't necessarily the person who has done the same job somewhere else. It may be someone who has faced the particular challenges your business is about to encounter.
This is where a good recruitment process should go beyond the job description.
What does the business need this person to change, build, improve or deliver?
That is often a much more valuable starting point than a list of responsibilities.
Think about the team, not just the individual
Every senior appointment changes the capability of the wider team.
When considering a new hire, it is worth looking at the existing team and asking:
- What are we already strong at?
- Where are the capability gaps?
- What skills will we need in 12–24 months?
- What does this person need to bring that we don't currently have?
- How will they complement the people already in the business?
- What could they develop or bring out in others?
This changes the recruitment conversation from:
“Who can do this job?”
to:
“What capability do we need to add to this team?”
That is a much more strategic question.
Don't automatically replace like-for-like
One of the easiest mistakes to make is assuming the person leaving represents the blueprint for the person coming in.
They don't.
The previous incumbent may have been excellent. They may have built strong relationships, delivered significant growth and been highly valued by the business.
But the business may have evolved.
If the company is now pursuing a different strategy, there is an opportunity to rethink the role rather than simply recreate it.
A business may, for example, have previously needed a highly operational Sales Director focused on a mature customer base.
If the next phase involves significant new business growth, channel expansion or international development, it may need a leader with a different balance of commercial, strategic and transformational capability.
The title might remain the same.
The person shouldn't necessarily be expected to be the same.
Build for the next stage of growth
This becomes particularly important in high-growth businesses.
A company doesn't necessarily need to hire someone who is perfect for where it is today.
It needs someone who can succeed today while having the capability to grow with the business.
What happens when the team doubles in size?
What happens when the business enters another channel?
What happens after an acquisition?
What happens when the founder or Managing Director needs to delegate more responsibility?
The right hire may be someone who has already experienced those transitions.
Equally, they may be someone who hasn't done exactly the same thing before but has demonstrated the capability to navigate similar complexity.
This is where relying too heavily on a checklist can become restrictive.
The cost of getting it wrong
The cost of a poor hiring decision is rarely just the recruitment fee.
There is the salary, of course, but also the time spent interviewing, onboarding and managing the individual. There may be disruption to customers, projects and the wider team.
Most importantly, there is the opportunity cost.
If a business is trying to deliver a major growth initiative and the person responsible isn't able to deliver it, six or twelve months can disappear very quickly.
The business then has to start again.
This is why getting the brief right before going to market matters so much.
The more important the role is to the future direction of the business, the less useful a transactional approach to hiring becomes.
Candidates are evaluating the business too
There is another side to this.
The strongest candidates aren't simply asking whether they can do the job.
They are asking whether they want to be part of what the business is building.
What is the ambition?
What is the leadership team trying to achieve?
What investment is being made?
What autonomy will they have?
What will success look like?
What could the role become?
For businesses competing for experienced leadership talent, being able to articulate the opportunity is therefore just as important as defining the requirements.
A compelling role isn't simply a list of responsibilities.
It is a clear proposition about where the business is going and the part this person will play in getting there.
Start with the business, not the job description
A strong recruitment process shouldn't begin with:
“Here's the JD. Can you find us some candidates?”
It should begin with a conversation about the business.
What is changing?
What is the ambition?
What isn't working today?
What capabilities don't currently exist?
What does success look like in 12 months?
What will this person need to achieve that their predecessor didn't?
And perhaps most importantly:
If we hire the right person, what will be different about the business in two years' time?
Only then can you properly define the role.
From filling vacancies to building capability
Recruitment is often treated as a response to a problem.
Someone leaves, a vacancy appears and the business needs to replace them.
But the most valuable hiring decisions are often proactive rather than reactive. They start with the strategy and work backwards.
Where are we going?
What capabilities will we need to get there?
What does the team need to look like?
Who do we need to add to make that happen?
That doesn't mean every appointment needs to be transformational. Sometimes the right answer really is someone who can step into an existing role and deliver it exceptionally well.
But when a business is entering a new phase of growth, transformation, acquisition or change, the hiring strategy should reflect that.
If the ambition is to grow a division, expand into new customers, develop a new channel or build a stronger leadership team, the people hired today need to be capable of operating in that future environment.
Otherwise, businesses risk solving today's vacancy only to create tomorrow's capability gap.
The question worth asking
Before starting your next search, take a step back from the job description.
Don't just ask:
“Who can fill this role?”
Ask:
“What does our team need to become?”
Because ultimately, the goal of hiring shouldn't simply be to put someone in a seat.
It should be to build a team with the capability, experience and ambition to move the business forward.
The question isn't just who can fill the role. It's who will make the team — and the business — better.
