What a Written Role-Spec Actually Contains Before You Post the Job

A practical look at the artifact a founder-led firm should produce before any role goes live, what's inside it, what isn't, and where a Blueprint fits if the spec work needs an outside pressure test.

By Wednesday, most founders reading along have already done the harder cognitive work. The score is honest. The gaps are visible. The block, usually, is on what the role-spec actually contains, beyond the title and the salary band, before the job goes live.

The honest answer is that a hireable role-spec is a much more specific document than what most founder-led firms produce when they post a senior hire. The job description is the surface. The role-spec is the operating system underneath, and the hire's first 90 days will go well or badly based mostly on whether that surface and that system both exist.

This post is what's in it. Not theory. The specific artifacts.

The five components of a hireable role-spec

A hireable role-spec contains five things. Each is a separate document or a separate section, and each addresses a specific failure mode that hires into founder-led firms run into in the first two quarters.

1. The decision charter

One page. Names the decisions the hire owns, in plain language, with thresholds.

Hypothetical: for a Director of Delivery role at a 14-person fractional CMO firm, the charter might read: Owns quality review on all client deliverables under $100k engagement value without founder sign-off. Owns capacity allocation across the senior consultant pool. Owns scope-change decisions up to 15% of original engagement value. Escalates to founder: scope changes above 15%, quality concerns on retainer accounts above $200k annual, any deliverable a client has formally objected to.

That's a charter. It's specific, it has thresholds, and it's testable. Most senior hires walk into roles where their charter is "use your judgment," which is appropriate at year three and disastrous at week three, because the founder's judgment hasn't been transferred yet.

The charter is the single most load-bearing artifact in the spec. If only one document gets written before the role goes live, this is the one.

2. The decision rules

Three to ten pages, depending on the role. For each major decision the hire will own, the rule the founder applies today, written down so the hire can apply it tomorrow.

Pricing rules. Standard engagements price in this band per consultant week. Out-of-scope asks price at this rate. Discounts above 10% require my approval. Renewals price at last engagement rate plus 5% unless the client has signaled material expansion.

Quality bar. A deliverable is ready to ship when (a) it answers the original brief, (b) the senior consultant has signed off, (c) it has been spell-checked and formatted to template, (d) the client-facing summary fits on one page. We don't ship if any of these is no.

Scope-change protocol. When a client asks for an out-of-scope item mid-engagement, the senior consultant determines whether it's under 10% of remaining hours and within the engagement's stated scope band. If yes, accept and document. If no, escalate to me with a one-paragraph framing of the ask and the recommendation.

The rules don't have to be perfect. They have to exist. A hire reading written rules can apply them, calibrate them, and propose changes from a position of having operated them. A hire reading "ask the founder" cannot.

3. The 90-day metric

One paragraph. The single observable, founder-independent number you'll look at in 90 days to decide whether the hire is working.

For a Director of Delivery: In 90 days, the founder reviews fewer than 20% of client deliverables before they ship, and the average quality-review cycle time is under 48 hours.

For a Head of Revenue: In 90 days, 50% of inbound leads are scoped and quoted without the founder on the discovery call, and the average time from inbound lead to quote is under 5 business days.

For a Director of Operations: In 90 days, the weekly leadership meeting closes in 60 minutes with all decisions documented and assigned, with the founder having attended as a participant rather than the chair.

Concrete. Observable. Founder-independent. The 90-day metric is what turns "is the hire working?" from a feeling into a question with an answer. Without it, the founder evaluates the hire by mood, which produces six-month surprises in either direction.

4. The authority document

One page. What the hire can spend, decide, and commit to without checking, on day one.

Spending threshold. Decisions they can make without sign-off. Decisions that still come to the founder. People they can hire, fire, or have hard conversations with. Vendors they can engage. Client commitments they can make. The format isn't important. The existence of the document is.

The version most founder-led firms run is "we'll figure it out as we go." That version produces, by week three, a senior hire who ccs the founder on every meaningful decision because cc-ing is the safer option for the new person. The hire isn't being timid, they're being rational. Authority that isn't written is authority that defaults to "ask the founder."

The fix is one page, written before the offer. The hire reads it during onboarding. The founder commits to it. Both parties have a shared reference for what authority looks like at week one, week thirteen, and week fifty-two.

5. The 90-day onboarding plan

Two pages. Week-by-week, what the hire is doing, what the founder is doing, and what the firm is doing differently to receive them.

Week 1 to 4: founder-paired observation, the hire shadows decisions, founder narrates the thinking, hire begins making lower-stakes calls with founder review.

Week 5 to 8: handoff weeks, hire owns the decision charter in stated areas, founder reviews after the fact rather than before, weekly debrief on calibration.

Week 9 to 13: standalone operation in the charter, founder reviews monthly, 90-day check against the metric.

The plan doesn't have to follow this exact rhythm. It has to exist as a plan, with the founder hours blocked on the calendar in week one, not "I'll find time when they start." We'd argue the most expensive failure mode for a senior hire is the founder being too busy in the first 30 days to actually transfer the authority the hire was brought in to absorb.

If those five components feel like more spec work than the search itself, the readiness diagnostic surfaces which ones are actually missing and which you've already done in your head: altvina.com/diagnostic/pre-hire-readiness.

What the role-spec is not

A role-spec, as we mean it, is not the job description. The job description is the public-facing version, three paragraphs, the one that goes on the careers page or the LinkedIn post.

It's also not a strategic plan. It doesn't say what the firm should become. It says how the firm operates today and where this hire fits into that operation.

It's not a handbook either. It's specific to this role and this hire, not a general operating doc for the firm. (Though the act of writing it usually surfaces the gaps that need to become a general operating doc later.)

And it isn't a permanent document. It's the artifact for the first 12 months. After the hire has been in the role for a year, the spec evolves, the charter widens, the rules calibrate, the authority expands. The spec is the starting point, not the steady state.

When the spec work needs an outside pressure test

Some founders can write the role-spec themselves. The firm size, the founder's documentation muscle, and the role's overlap with the founder's own work all factor in. When the founder can do it cleanly in two to four weeks of focused work, that's the right path.

Some can't, or can but won't, because the spec work always feels less urgent than the work that's already on the calendar. Three patterns we'd flag in self-led spec work that doesn't get done.

Decision rules live as judgment, not as text. The founder knows the pricing logic, the quality bar, the scope protocol, but writing them down is a different cognitive task than applying them. The doc gets started, gets to two pages, then sits.

Authority requires a real call the founder hasn't made yet. Naming spending thresholds and decision rights is uncomfortable. Most founders prefer the implicit version, even though the implicit version is what creates the cc-the-founder pattern.

The 90-day metric usually points to a question that's still open. When the founder isn't sure what success looks like, the strategic value of the role isn't yet defined, which is itself a finding worth surfacing before the role goes live.

The Altvina Blueprint is built to get this unstuck for firms where the spec writing has stalled. It's a fixed-scope engagement, the same one Wednesday's scorecard was designed to surface as the next step for a 0 to 5 score. It diagnoses and roadmaps. It does not write the firm's role spec for it. The Blueprint delivers a Bottleneck Diagnosis of where the founder is embedded and whether the embedment is genuinely a hire problem, a workflow problem, or a repositioning problem, an Operating Roadmap that puts the fixes in order, an Expert Deployment Brief that scopes the role for the genuine hire findings, a Decision Framework for the recurring decisions the new hire will need rules for, and a Recommended Path Forward covering every option, including doing nothing.

A firm that walks out of a Blueprint knows which embedment is a real hire, how the role is scoped, and which decisions need rules before the hire starts. It writes its own role spec from the deployment brief, and runs the search at much higher odds than a firm that walks into it with a job description and a salary band.

When the spec work doesn't need outside help

Naming where a Blueprint doesn't fit is part of how we earn the recommendation where it does.

If you've already written the decision charter, the rules, the metric, and the authority doc, and a peer has pressure-tested the spec and found it concrete, the search is the next step and the role-spec work is done. A Blueprint at that point is buying advice you don't need.

If you're in the middle of a search you've already opened and a candidate is in flight against a role you can defend, the right move is closing the search, not pausing for spec work. Diagnosis at that point is procrastination, not preparation.

If the bottleneck the hire is meant to solve is acute (a senior person leaving in 30 days, a client renewal in jeopardy, a delivery quality crisis already in motion), the next 30 days are triage, not architecture. The Blueprint is for the next quarter, not the next month.

The Blueprint is the right step for the firm that has decided to hire, scored 0 to 5 on the readiness scorecard, has 8 to 12 weeks of runway before the role needs to be filled, and wants the spec work done with someone outside the firm who can pressure-test the doc against patterns that look the same from the inside but produce very different hires.

Closing

The Altvina Blueprint turns "we should hire" into "the root cause is named, the role is scoped, the decisions that need rules are framed, and the firm knows the order to act in." For a founder-led firm at three or fewer yeses on the readiness scorecard with the capacity to act inside the next quarter, the Blueprint is designed to be the highest-leverage next move, because the cost of running the search against an unready spec is meaningfully higher than the cost of pausing to write it.

Tomorrow's post closes the week with the most expensive hire framing in fractional firms, the "I'll just clone myself" reflex and the pattern that produces capable senior people who can't actually do the job they were hired into.

Continue the series

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on the Pre-Hire Readiness series. The full arc:

• Monday: When the Symptoms Point at Hiring (and When They Don't)
• Tuesday: What It Costs to Hire Into the Wrong Gap
• Wednesday: The 8-Question Pre-Hire Readiness Scorecard
• Thursday: What a Written Role-Spec Actually Contains Before You Post the Job (this post)
• Friday: Why "I'll Just Clone Myself" Is the Most Expensive Hire Framing in Fractional Firms

Run the diagnostic

Eight questions, fifteen minutes, before any job description goes live.

Content and Accuracy Disclaimer

This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Altvina team. We rigorously fact-check our content; if you notice an inaccuracy, please contact us so we can correct it.