Having versus doing

The word criteria comes from the Greek krites, which means "to judge." Its original purpose was precise: to create a reliable basis for separating truth from error, the real from the apparent. Not just to choose, but to choose well. To discern.

Aristotle (and other Greek radical thinkers after him) liked to distinguish between potentiality and actuality.

A thing can have the capacity for something without ever actualizing it. A seed has the potential to become a tree. But potential, by itself, produces nothing. What matters is what gets actualized, expressed, done.

In hiring, the criteria you set are the basis on which you decide who gets in and who doesn't. They determine what you look for in candidates, how you write the job, how you sell the career opportunity, how you evaluate people, and ultimately who you hire. So it matters enormously what your criteria actually are.

The foundation of our modern hiring process, the place where the criteria are set in stone, is the job description. And like a lot of things in recruiting, I wish it were better!

Most job descriptions aren't job descriptions. They're people descriptions

Most job descriptions today are built on a list: years of experience, educational background, a specific degree, familiarity with certain tools, and proven knowledge of a particular market. They describe the kind of person the company is looking for, not the kind of work that needs to get done.

A job description built around requirements is a bet on potentiality. The reasoning goes that success will follow if a candidate has sufficient experience, education, and skills. The more they have, the more likely success is. Stack enough qualifications and strong performance becomes probable.

That logic is, of course, flawed in many important ways, and this is why I always advocate for job descriptions actually to be job descriptions, not people descriptions.

First, define the job. Then find the person

There is a common confusion in our industry between two things that are part of the same process but are fundamentally different:

Describing the job and evaluating candidates for it. First, you define the job. Then you find ways to identify candidates who can do it. Conflating the two is where a lot of hiring goes wrong from the very start.

So before you post the next role, ask yourself a simple question: does your job description describe the job, or does it describe the person you imagine doing the job?

How to write a job description

When you sit down to define a role, resist the instinct to build a requirements list first. Unless a specific certification or legal qualification is strictly required (like a sommelier certification, a food safety license, or a legal credential), don't let the list of must-haves dominate the document.

Start with the results. Ask yourself:

• What does this person need to accomplish in the first 90 days? In the first year?
• What problems currently exist in this role that they'll need to solve?
• What will be measurably different because of how well they perform?
• What does great look like in terms of output, not in terms of background?

Define the responsibilities and business outcomes the person in this role will own. That is your job description. The requirements list, if it appears at all, should follow from those outcomes, not precede them.

How to evaluate whether a candidate can do the job

Once the job is clearly defined, you can turn to the question of assessment. When I think about how to evaluate whether someone can actually do a job, two things stand out above the rest.

• Past performance. It is not a perfect proxy because context matters and circumstances vary, but it is the closest thing we have to reliable evidence. What has this person actually accomplished? Under what conditions? What did they take on that was hard? What did great performance look like in practice?
• Motivation. Not enthusiasm in an interview, which is easy to rehearse, but genuine desire to do this work, in this context, at this point in their career. A person who is deeply motivated to solve the specific problem a role presents will outperform a more qualified candidate who isn't. Almost every time.

I believe motivation is underrated as a hiring criterion. Past performance predicts future performance. But motivation to do this specific job, in this specific context, at this specific moment in someone's career, that is what separates good hires from great ones.

When past performance and motivation become the primary criteria for a hiring decision, assessment accuracy increases dramatically.

The cost of getting it wrong

The most counterintuitive and costly consequence of the requirements-heavy job description is this:

High-potential candidates who actually have the exact skill set required and meet every listed requirement rarely want to do the same work again. They're looking for a next step, not a repeat. So they don't apply.

In life, there's a meaningful difference between thinking you can do something and knowing you can do it. In hiring, that distinction plays out in ways most hiring managers don't see until it's too late.

In hospitality, where the cost of a mis-hire is particularly steep, getting this right matters more than in most industries. The sector already operates with the highest turnover of any industry in the US. A significant share of that turnover is preventable. Nearly 50% of new hires are terminated or quit within their first 18 months on the job, and the evidence points squarely at hiring processes designed around the wrong criteria from the start.

The upside of getting it right

Defining a job well isn't just a reframing exercise. It has real operational consequences across the entire hiring process.

• It changes how you align your team before the search begins. A results-oriented job definition forces the hiring manager and the recruiter to agree on what success actually means. That conversation, done well, eliminates a lot of costly misalignment mid-search.
• It changes how you write the job ad. 86% of job seekers find results-based job descriptions easier to read and more motivating than credential-heavy ones. In an industry fighting for talent, that's a meaningful advantage.
• It changes how you interview. If you know what the role needs to produce, you can build an evaluation framework around specific, relevant evidence. What has this person actually accomplished that resembles this challenge? What were the circumstances? What did they do with what they had?
• It changes who applies. High-potential candidates motivated to solve the problem the role presents will self-select in. Candidates with the credentials but no real desire to do this work will self-select out. That's exactly what you want.

In the end, it's not what you have. It's what you do with what you have

The criteria you use to define a role shape every decision that follows.

• If those criteria are built around having (credentials, titles, years logged), the process selects for the appearance of competence.
• If they're built around doing (what a person has actually accomplished, and whether they genuinely want to accomplish what this role demands next), the process selects for something much closer to the truth.

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