You Wrote a Job Description for a Person Who Doesn’t Exist

A company with 35 employees and fresh funding posts a Director of Operations role. The requirements: 10+ years of experience, cross-functional leadership, global exposure, vendor management, budget ownership, process design, team building, and strategic planning. Eighteen bullet points total.

That’s not a job description. That’s a fantasy.

The person who can actually do this job reads that posting and moves on. They don’t see themselves in it, because very few people actually check all eighteen boxes. Or they read it and conclude the company doesn’t really understand what the role is. Either way, they’re gone.

Here’s what happens next. The posting attracts a wave of polished applicants from large companies who match the keywords beautifully. Impressive titles. Recognizable logos. They interview well. They get hired. And six months later, the founder is wondering why their new Director can’t function without a team of ten and a playbook someone else wrote.

I’ve watched this play out dozens of times. The failure doesn’t start with the hire. It starts with the posting.

A Director at a 35-person company is not doing the same job as a Director at a 3,500-person company. The title is identical. The work is completely different. At your stage, this person is building infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet, making decisions with incomplete information, and doing work that is technically below their title because there’s nobody to delegate it to. The person who thrives in that environment is rarely the one with the cleanest resume. It’s the one who has done it before at a company that looked a lot like yours and knows how to build without much infrastructure.

That person is also not reading your eighteen bullet points. They already have a good job. If they encounter your posting at all, they’re looking for one thing: a reason to be interested. Not your qualifications list. Not your culture paragraph. They want to know what this role actually owns, what problem it exists to solve, and what the next 12 months actually look like.

Most postings never get there because they’re written for the company you want to be, not the company you are right now. “Global cross-functional leadership” at a 35-person startup might mean you’re on a Zoom with a contract manufacturer in Ireland and a consultant in San Diego, not running regional teams across three continents. But the posting doesn’t say that. So the person who has actually done the Ireland-and-San-Diego version doesn’t recognize the job, and the person who has done the three-continents version shows up expecting resources that don’t exist.

The fix is uncomfortable because it requires honesty. Lead with the problem, not the pedigree. Say “you’ll be the first person in this function” and “there is no existing playbook,” because the right candidate finds that exciting. Cut your requirements down to a few genuinely non-negotiable items and drop the rest.

You’re not trying to attract 200 applicants. You’re trying to get in front of five people who can do the job and close one of them. Every word in your posting should be written with that math in mind. The person you need won’t self-select into a process designed for everyone. They’ll engage with one that was clearly written for someone like them.