You posted the role. You interviewed. You made an offer.
Three months later, the person isn’t performing the way you expected. And when you try to describe the gap, what you wanted vs. what you’re getting, you realize the description keeps shifting depending on what came up that week.
The role wasn’t clearly defined when you hired for it. It was a moving target. And even a good hire can’t hit a target that keeps moving.
The problem isn’t who you hired. It’s that success in the role was never defined before you started looking for someone to achieve it.
Most Businesses Don’t Hire Into Defined Roles. They Hire Into Evolving Expectations.
A job posting is not a role definition.
It describes responsibilities in general terms. It lists requirements that look good on paper. It signals what the company values in the abstract.
It doesn’t answer the questions that actually determine whether a hire succeeds.
What does this person own completely on day one? What does success look like at 30, 90, and 180 days? What behavioral wiring does this role actually demand under pressure? What decisions are this person authorized to make alone, and where does their authority end?
When those questions don’t have written answers before the search begins, the role is a moving target.
The person hired into it is evaluated against an evolving internal standard the owner carries in their head, one that shifts based on what the business needs that week.
And the hire keeps failing to meet a standard they were never given.
The Service Coordinator Who Could Never Get It Right
I worked with an HVAC contractor about eighteen months ago. Eleven million in revenue. He’d hired a service coordinator six months earlier.
Smart. Organized. Previous experience in a similar role at another company.
Six months in, the owner described her as “close but not quite there.” She was handling the basics but missing things he considered important.
When I asked him what “there” looked like, his answer changed three times in the same conversation.
First he said it was about proactive customer communication. Then it was about catching scheduling errors before they became customer complaints. Then it was about managing the dispatch queue independently without daily guidance.
When I asked her what she thought success in her role looked like, she described something different from all three.
She was working from the job posting. He was working from a mental model of the role that had evolved over six months of watching her work.
Neither of those versions had ever been made explicit before she was hired. Neither had been shared with her directly once she started.
She wasn’t underperforming. She was performing against the wrong definition of the role, because the right one had never existed on paper.
What a Job Target Intensive Actually Builds
The Job Target Intensive is a structured process that answers, in writing, every question the search process requires, before a single application is reviewed.
It has four outputs.
First, the behavioral profile. Using Predictive Index, the Job Target defines the behavioral wiring the role demands. Not what sounds good on a job description, what the role will actually require on a difficult Tuesday when the schedule blows up and a customer is unhappy.
A service coordinator role that demands urgency, adaptability, and direct communication has a different PI profile than one that demands methodical process management and careful documentation. Both can be called “service coordinator.” They require completely different behavioral wiring.
The Job Target makes that difference explicit before the search begins.
Second, the success outcomes. What does this person need to have accomplished at 30, 60, and 90 days for the hire to be considered on track? Not “getting settled” or “learning the systems.” Specific, observable outcomes that both the owner and the new hire can agree were met or weren’t.
Third, the decision rights. What is this person authorized to decide alone? What needs to be escalated? Where does their ownership end and someone else’s begin? Without these defined, the new hire defaults to asking for everything. With them, they can act.
Fourth, the interview guide. Questions built specifically against the behavioral profile and the success outcomes, designed to surface how candidates actually operate, not how they describe themselves in a high-stakes setting.
When all four exist before the first interview, the search process changes entirely.
You’re no longer choosing between gut feelings. You’re comparing candidates against a written standard.
And the person who gets the offer walks into a role with a clear definition of success, not a moving target they’re expected to figure out.
What Hiring Into Moving Targets Keeps Costing
The cycle repeats.
The hire doesn’t work out. The owner concludes the person wasn’t right. They search again. The new person walks into the same undefined role. The same performance gap surfaces at the same point.
The direct cost is salary, recruiting time, and the three to six months of organizational disruption every time a seat turns over.
The indirect cost is the owner’s growing conviction that finding good people is impossible, a belief that leads to holding on to seats they should have exited, making decisions they should have handed off, and building a business that stays dependent on them because they’ve stopped believing anyone else can do it right.
That belief is almost never accurate.
What’s accurate is that the hiring process kept producing the same result because it kept starting from the same undefined place.
Define the role. Define success. Define the behavioral standard. The right hire becomes findable, and the pattern finally breaks.
Before the Next Search, Define What You’re Actually Searching For.
If your next hire is important enough to get right, it’s worth defining what “right” actually means before the search begins. I do a 30-minute Discovery Call where we look at the role, what it demands, and what a Job Target Intensive would build before your next hire goes out. No pitch. Just a conversation about where your business is and what’s in the way.