Published October 2, 2026 · Altvina Insights · 5 min read

The Job Posting That Is Actually A Symptom

Define what a role owns before you post it. Most bad hires in small service firms are definition mistakes, and three questions answered first will usually catch them.

You open a blank document to write the job posting, and the first thing you type is a list of everything nobody else wants to own.

Scheduling. Vendor emails. Chasing the invoices that go out late. The report three people ask for and nobody produces. It reads like a job. It is closer to a pile.

Our view is that most bad hires in small service firms are not hiring mistakes at all. They are definition mistakes that show up six months later wearing a person's name.

Two tells that show up before the posting is live

The first is timing. The operations role tends to get posted in the worst month of the year, in the middle of the crunch, when everyone is behind and someone finally says out loud that we need another person. Hiring pressure follows workload rather than design. A role written during a bad month is usually a role designed to absorb a bad month.

The second is the shape of the description. A long list of tasks and no decision anywhere in it. Support, coordinate, assist, help manage. Read it back and you cannot tell what this person gets to decide on their own.

The hire then arrives, works hard, and is a disappointment by spring through no fault of their own. They were hired to hold a pile. A pile does not tell anybody what good looks like, so the founder keeps making the calls and the new person keeps waiting to be told.

Three questions to answer before you write the job posting

These take an afternoon. They are worth more than the posting.

1. What decision will this person own outright?

Not tasks. One decision, named, that they make without checking with you.

Which jobs get scheduled this week. Which invoices go out Friday and which wait. Whether a job is ready to start, or goes back to sales for missing information. Try to finish this sentence: they decide ______, and nobody overrules it. When you cannot finish it, the role is not defined yet, and writing the posting will not define it.

2. What happens to that decision today if nobody is hired?

Answer this honestly, out loud, with whoever else is in the room.

Sometimes something genuinely breaks. Work stops, cash sits in draft invoices, a client waits on an answer nobody is authorized to give. A gap like that is structural, and a hire is a reasonable answer to it.

The other answer is the one worth slowing down for. If the honest version is "nothing breaks, it just gets slower," you may be about to solve a temporary problem with a permanent cost. Slower is real and it does have a price. But slow is not automatically a headcount problem, and a salary is a long commitment to make against a busy quarter.

3. Who makes that decision right now?

Usually one of two answers, and they point in different directions.

If the answer is you, the hire is asking you to hand over something you have been deciding on instinct for years. So write down what you would decide in the five most common cases. Not a policy document, just five lines. That page is closer to the real job than anything you were about to post, and it is also the thing that lets a new person be right without you in the room.

If the answer is "it depends" or "whoever gets to it first," then the decision has no owner today. Hiring does not create one by itself. Assign it on Monday, for free, to somebody already on the payroll. In three weeks you will know whether the problem was ownership or volume. The test is cheap, and most firms skip it.

What the answers usually add up to

A clear decision, something that breaks without it, and a founder currently making it: that is a hire, and the posting mostly writes itself once you say which decision comes with the seat.

A clear decision, but nothing breaks and it only gets slower: that is a volume or a season problem, and it is worth asking how long the season lasts before you sign a permanent cost.

No clear decision at all: it is not a hiring question yet. It is a question about how the work moves, and hiring into it tends to add a person to the confusion rather than remove it.

When the need is genuinely temporary

Mapping what a role should own before anybody is hired is diagnosis work. It is unglamorous and it is the part that gets skipped, because the posting feels like progress and the mapping feels like a delay.

Where the need turns out to be temporary rather than structural, a hire is the expensive answer to it. A matched operator who does the work for the season, and hands back a defined decision with a written owner when they go, is often the better one. We point founders toward that option when the honest answer to the second question is that nothing breaks, it just gets slower.

Either way, answer the three questions before the posting goes up. It is the cheapest hour in the whole hiring process.

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