A hiring brief is a creative brief with a different output

Recruitment tends to be treated as a search problem — find more candidates, screen faster, close sooner. Often it is a definition problem. When a role is described by its job title and a list of desirable qualities, every stage afterwards inherits that ambiguity: sourcing casts too wide, screening becomes subjective, interviews test general impressiveness, and the final choice comes down to who interviewed best rather than who will do the work best.

Describe the first ninety days, not the ideal person

Instead of listing attributes, write what the person will actually do in their first three months and what will be different once they have. That single change makes a role definition testable. It tells you which experience is genuinely required, which is merely conventional, and what an interview should try to find out.

It also exposes roles that are not real yet. If nobody can describe what changes when the seat is filled, the hire is likely to disappoint regardless of who takes it.

Separate the requirements that are actually requirements

• Essential: the role fails without it. Usually shorter than expected — often two or three items.
• Trainable: needed to do the job, but learnable in weeks by someone with the essentials.
• Preference: convenient, and quietly responsible for most unnecessary rejections.

Sorting the list this way widens a shortlist without lowering a standard, which is usually what a stalled search needs.

Ask about work that has happened

Hypothetical questions test articulacy. Questions about specific past situations test experience. "What would you do if a campaign underperformed?" invites a rehearsed answer; "Tell me about a campaign that underperformed — what did you notice first, and what did you change?" is much harder to answer well without having lived it.

Score the answers against the ninety-day description, written down, immediately after each interview and before comparing notes. Discussion before scoring is how one confident voice becomes the panel's opinion.

Treat the process as a reflection of the organisation

Candidates read the recruitment process as evidence of how the company operates. Slow replies, rescheduled interviews and silence after a final round are all information, and the strongest candidates — the ones with alternatives — act on that information first.

Every candidate who is not hired still forms a view of the company. That view travels.