🧱 The Lazy First Step That Costs Millions
Here’s how most leadership searches begin.
A senior exec resigns. Within hours, someone finds the old job description, tweaks a few adjectives — maybe “fast-growing” becomes “scaling” — and emails it to a recruiter.
The clock is ticking, the inbox fills, and everyone feels productive.
Except they’ve just made the first — and most expensive — mistake in hiring. Job descriptions have their place — they’re useful for attracting candidates once the role is defined — but they should never be step one in a critical hire.
That document wasn’t written for this moment. It was written years ago, for a different business model, team structure, and ownership context. It lists activities and credentials, not commercial outcomes. It focuses on what the last person did, not what the next person must deliver.
A job description hires a replica of the past, not the creator of the future.
And that’s why most hiring failures are locked in long before the first CV ever lands.
🧩 What a Job Description Really Is — and Why It Fails As The Starting Point
Most job descriptions sound something like this:
“Lead the business to deliver growth and operational excellence. Build a high-performing team. Partner with the board to execute the strategy.”
To be clear, a well-written job description still has value — it’s how you communicate the opportunity to the market. But it’s marketing collateral, not a blueprint for decision-making. That’s the crucial distinction — attraction versus alignment.
There’s no definition of growth. No clarity on what “high-performing” looks like. No sense of pace, trade-offs, or time horizon.
Job descriptions survive because they feel safe and familiar. They sound intelligent without saying anything that might divide opinion. They keep everyone vaguely aligned — and safely uncommitted.
They describe activities, not outcomes.
They list responsibilities, not results.
They tell candidates what to do, not what they’re accountable for.
That’s why the ValueContract exists — to replace vagueness with clarity, and consensus theatre with commercial alignment.
🎯 The Right Starting Point: The ValueContract
Think of it this way: the job description sells the role externally, but the ValueContract aligns the role internally. One is for attraction; the other is for accuracy. It sits between the investment thesis and the first interview, serving as the one-page translation of the Value Creation Plan into measurable success.
Built properly, it forces the board, CEO, and investors to agree on six things:
1️⃣ Mission — Why this role exists. The commercial rationale, linked directly to enterprise value.
2️⃣ Outcomes — What must be achieved. 5–8 measurable results across commercial, operational, cultural, and people dimensions.
3️⃣ Attributes — Who the leader is. The innate traits they’ll need to thrive under pressure.
4️⃣ Competencies — How they operate. The observable behaviours that turn those traits into impact.
5️⃣ Skills & Experience — Their licence to operate. Contextual expertise — useful, but not predictive.
6️⃣ Evidence Standards — How success is judged. Objective proof over opinion, replacing “gut feel” with investor-grade rigour.
It’s simple, but not easy. Writing a ValueContract brings the strategic debate forward — clarifying what this hire must do, change, and build in the first 12–18 months, before the search even starts.
🔍 Start With Outcomes, Not Activities
Every great ValueContract begins with outcomes — the proof points that show the mission is being delivered.
Each outcome describes one observable change in the business, measurable in absolute terms and time-bound.
For example:
Revenue: Group revenue grows organically by 4% year-on-year by Q4 2026.
Profitability: EBITDA margin rises from 12% to 14% by the end of FY26.
Financial Control: Forecast accuracy is maintained within ±3% by Q2 2026.
Leadership Team: Quarterly priorities are achieved at least 90% of the time for three consecutive quarters.
Operating Rhythm: A monthly performance cadence is embedded across all functions, with 100% of variance actions tracked and closed.
M&A Integration: Each annual bolt-on delivers £10 m incremental EBITDA within six months of completion.
Culture: Employee eNPS rises by 20 points within 12 months.
Exit Readiness: The Board signs off the business as “exit-ready” — clean data, consistent performance, and signed-off succession — by Q4 2026.
Each one can be scored as achieved or not. That’s the point.
No noise. No overlap. Just measurable movement in the levers that matter.
Once those outcomes are agreed, you can identify the attributes and competencies that will make them possible.
That’s not a checklist; it’s a debate worth having. It’s where alignment becomes real — and where hiring shifts from narrative to evidence.
⚙️ How the ValueContract Changes the Game
1️⃣ It forces the hard conversation early.
Before a penny goes to a search firm, the Chair, CEO, and deal team must debate what the next 12–18 months of success look like. There will be disagreement — and that’s healthy. A candid debate now beats polite confusion later. When the outcomes are agreed, everyone finally means the same thing when they say “great hire.”
2️⃣ It connects talent to the investment thesis.
The ValueContract translates your Value Creation Plan into human accountability. It turns EBITDA levers into personal scorecards. When “+£15 m EBITDA” sits on the plan, you can point to the one leader responsible for making it happen.
3️⃣ It de-risks the search.
Interviewers stop scoring charisma and start scoring evidence. Debriefs shift from “I liked her energy” to “she’s delivered that outcome before in a tougher context.” Bias falls. Confidence rises.
4️⃣ It defines the post-hire roadmap.
Those same outcomes drive onboarding, quarterly reviews, and bonuses. The new leader knows exactly what “winning” looks like from Day 1.
🧠 Why Job Descriptions Keep Surviving
Because they’re easy. They feel quick. And they avoid tension.
Writing a ValueContract, by contrast, is uncomfortable.
It exposes trade-offs:
Do we need a turnaround artist or a scale-up builder?
Is the priority margin or growth? Should the CEO focus on bolt-ons or fixing operations?
Those are strategic questions — which is precisely why they belong in the hiring process.
You can wrestle with them once, at the start, or ten times later when the new hire is struggling and the board is rewriting history.
Job descriptions preserve vagueness so no one has to have that debate. The ValueContract brings it forward — where it belongs.
⚡ Precision Creates Speed
The common objection: “We don’t have time for this.”
But ambiguity wastes more time than alignment ever will. A vague brief leads to endless shortlists, circular feedback, and boardroom fatigue.
Precision feels slower at first but compresses the entire cycle. Recruiters target the right candidates. Interviewers know what to test. Consensus forms faster because everyone’s scoring evidence against agreed outcomes, not trading gut feel.
Clarity accelerates. Vagueness corrodes.
💼 The PE Lens: Deal Diligence vs People Diligence
In private equity, every spreadsheet cell is stress-tested, every assumption debated.
But the people who must deliver the model? Often hired on instinct.
The ValueContract brings deal-grade rigour to people decisions.
It creates a clean line from the investment thesis → to the Value Creation Plan → to the role’s measurable outcomes → to the individual’s quarterly scorecard.
That’s what professionalises the human side of value creation. It turns hiring from HR process into capital allocation.
🧭 Making It Your Default
The next time a senior role opens, don’t start with the job description. Write it later — after you’ve aligned on outcomes through a ValueContract. Instead, run a one-hour ValueContract session.
Bring the Chair, CEO, and investor together and ask:
“What 5–8 outcomes must this leader deliver in the next 12–18 months?”
“What attributes and competencies will actually make that possible?”
“How will we rate their ability to achieve the outcomes?
Capture the answers on one page. That page will do more to protect enterprise value than any recruiter brief or reference call ever could.
🔑 The Takeaway
Hiring starts long before the first interview.
It starts with alignment — with the courage to define success before searching for someone to deliver it.
A job description keeps you anchored in the past.
A ValueContract defines the future.
One is HR paperwork.
The other is investor-grade due diligence.
You’d never buy a business on a vague IM.
Don’t hire a leader on a vague job description.
Mark Farrer-Brown is a former top-decile PE partner turned CEO mentor. Through Fit to Lead and the FOCUS hiring methodology, he helps PE firms and CEOs bring investor-grade discipline to leadership — identifying High-Performing candidates who turn investment theses into realised value.