The Hiring Side Is Broken Too

Chapter 6 was the diagnosis. This one is the part I actually get fired up about, because a lot of it is fixable, and it starts before a single resume comes in.

The Title Writes the Job Description

Most hiring goes wrong at the very first step, before a single resume comes in. The team names a role before it has defined what that role actually has to achieve.

A marketing lead says "we need a marketing manager." Okay. Why? Is it campaigns that need running? Sales enablement? Design? Content? "Marketing manager" is an enormous title that could mean five completely different jobs, and it's not even the worst offender. "Marketing Lead." "Sales Leader." "AI-Forward Marketing." Is that a head of marketing? A director? Someone whose actual job is running paid ads with a chatbot open in another tab? Nobody applying can tell, and neither, most of the time, can the person who wrote it. This isn't just a feeling. Titles with "Lead" in them tripled between 2019 and 2023, and postings with titles longer than three words see up to 70% fewer applications. Because the title comes first, the title writes the job description. And a vague or inflated title produces a generic job description, which attracts a flood of generic candidates while scaring off some of the best ones, over a third of candidates say they'll pass on a role over a confusing title alone, and now you're back to scanning two hundred lookalike resumes wondering why none of them feel right.

The fix is to flip the order. Start with the problem, not the title. Say it out loud: this is the problem we are trying to solve. Then notice that several different titles and backgrounds could solve it — and because you now know the actual problem, you can write a job description around that, instead of around a word. Problem first, then the description. You'd be amazed how much of "we can't find the right person" is really "we never defined the right person."

There's a name for this, and it runs underneath everything else in this thesis: need over paper. The need is the real thing: the actual problem a hire is supposed to solve, or just as often, the actual function a hire is supposed to fill. Not every role is a problem to solve in the dramatic sense. Some are a connecting link, someone who makes two teams talk to each other, someone whose job is to be the function, not to fix something broken. Either way, it's the real thing, and the actual person who could do it. The paper, the title, the requisition, the job description, the resume, is a lossy stand-in for that. Useful, necessary even, but a stand-in. The moment the paper starts leading, the need quietly stops being the thing anyone is working on.

I didn't want to leave that as a hunch, so I went and measured it. I pulled 141 real job postings, manager-to-director roles across marketing, product, finance, sales, HR, and AI, and read every single one. The titles were generic, about 42% of them. "Marketing Manager" is the obvious example: a marketing manager could own brand, or performance, or content, or events, so the title tells you almost nothing about the actual job. But when I read the descriptions underneath those titles, most of them did lay out the real work, and most asked for people who could do it. Where nearly all of them fell down was the one thing that matters most. Only 19% said, in any clear or measurable way, what success in the role would actually look like (a coincidence with Chapter 6's unrelated 19% stat on HR teams' own project-execution effectiveness, worth flagging so the two don't get read as the same finding). Forty-three percent didn't mention it at all. The sharpest case was finance, a job that is entirely about measuring things, where not one of the 22 postings I read named a single real target for the person they were hiring. They could all tell you the tasks. Almost none could tell you what doing the job well would look like. That is the gap, and it's a precise one: companies spell out the work and skip the outcome. You can't hire well for an outcome nobody wrote down.

There's a version of this that's even harder to catch, because it doesn't start with a bad conversation, it starts with a budget line. A manager identifies a real need and submits the request. It commonly stalls for around three months before the role can even be posted, and not because any one party is sitting on it, incomplete requests and missing compensation data bounce between the hiring manager, HR, and finance before approval really starts. When it finally clears, almost nobody goes back and asks the obvious question: is this still the same need? What did the team do to survive without this person in the meantime? Did the problem get partly solved some other way, or turn into a different problem entirely? The opening gets posted as if none of that happened, because on paper, nothing did. The requisition just says "Marketing Manager, approved." Recruiters have a name for this: requisition drift, the gap between what got approved and what the business actually needs by the time the role goes live. It's the same failure as the example above, just one step further upstream. The title didn't just skip the problem. Often, it's defending a problem that stopped being current months ago.

What I'd Actually Ask For

The second fix is just as concrete: tell people what you actually want from them, and mean it, specifically enough that they can deliver it. "Send a resume, cover letter, and portfolio" isn't specific. Here's what I'd ask for, and why each piece exists.

Resume: one page, no photo, because it invites judgment on things that have nothing to do with the job and steals attention from what does. A two-line summary at the top, so I'm not hunting for what you even do. Up to five bullets per role, not fifteen. That's not a style preference. It's what actually survives a seven-second scan, and it forces you to pick your best evidence instead of burying it in volume.

Cover letter: not "I'm passionate about your mission." Tell me specifically what you noticed about this role, or what we're building, that made you apply here and not somewhere else. And tell me one real thing about how you work, an actual habit or approach, not an adjective like "collaborative." If you can't say anything specific to us, you probably didn't look closely, and that tells me something too.

Portfolio: one thing you're proud of, told in enough detail that I can see the actual decision-making, not just the result. What was the real situation. What did you do. What would you do differently now. One real story beats ten polished claims.

Give me those three, done to that standard, and I can actually understand a candidate, instead of guessing from one dry page.

2026 Makes This Actually Doable

This isn't the same AI problem Chapter 5 warned about, and it's worth being clear on the difference. Chapter 5 was about candidates using AI to mass-produce and auto-submit low-effort spam, without reading most of it themselves. This is the opposite: using AI to evaluate materials a person put real effort into, resume, cover letter, portfolio together. And it has a side effect worth naming, since Chapter 6 described a hiring team drowning in volume. Requiring a cover letter and a portfolio isn't extra work piled onto an already-underwater team. It's a filter in reverse. Someone mass-applying with an AI-tailored resume they never read almost never bothers writing a real cover letter or assembling a portfolio. Ask for more, and the flood thins out before it ever reaches a human.

And here's what makes all of this reasonable in 2026: we have the tools. There is enough AI and automation now that a hiring team could take every candidate's resume, cover letter, and portfolio, evaluate them together, and hand the recruiter a short list of who is worth a conversation. That's not science fiction. That's a Tuesday. Doing that carefully matters, since automated hiring decisions are already regulated in places like New York City and the EU, and that's a good thing, not a reason to avoid the tools. The fix isn't secrecy. It's transparency, tell candidates what's expected of them, not just that they're being scored.

Show Candidates How They Actually Compare

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Imagine applying for a role you're sure you're strong for. Six years of experience, real results, you think you're a clear fit. Then you learn 43 people applied, the average experience among them is seven years, and 80% of them have already done the exact thing you thought made you stand out. Would you still feel like a lock? People aren't disappointed by rejection. They're disappointed by a rejection with zero context, after they believed they were exactly right. Give candidates the real picture, how they actually compare, not a score sitting in a black box, and even a "no" stops feeling arbitrary.

The Report Nobody's Published

Take that even further, and there's a version of transparency that doesn't exist anywhere I've seen, and probably should. Nobody publishes the report that would settle this: a hundred companies naming the roles they hired for, and showing what the person who got the job looked like on paper next to the people who didn't. Most rejected candidates never get to see that comparison. Maybe the person who got the role looked identical on paper and won on the actual conversation. Maybe they looked ten times stronger only because they'd learned to communicate their value better, not because they were more qualified. Nobody knows, because that data effectively doesn't exist anywhere public. And when the closest thing you get to an explanation is silence, or "not a good fit" with nothing further, it stops feeling like a process with logic to it. It starts to feel like an anomaly, something with no real explanation, and that feeling is exactly what erodes trust in the whole system.

None of this is an attack. It's the opposite. It's what I'd tell any hiring team that wanted to be great: define the problem before the title, ask for more than a resume, use the tools you already have, and above all, keep the job seeker in mind — because the person on the other side is a human being making one of the highest-stakes decisions of their life, and they can feel whether your process was built with them in mind or not.

The hiring side doesn't have to be broken. Most of what's wrong isn't a lack of good people. It's a lack of good design. And design, unlike drowning, is something you can choose to fix.