Design the role around the work, and the person.
Most roles are described by the qualifications they ask for, not the tasks they contain. Broad Careers works the other way around: the real tasks, what each one demands, and who fits both.
What does this role actually require?
Rarely what the position description says. Most descriptions list qualifications and years of experience, which are proxies for the thing that matters. Broad Careers starts from the tasks: what the job really involves day to day, what each task demands of the person doing it, and which of those demands are genuine requirements rather than how it has always been done.
Why do good hires underperform?
Usually because of the conditions, not the content. Someone can be excellent at the work itself and still be ground down by the interruptions, the pace, the sameness or the ambiguity around it. Those conditions are almost never written down, so they are almost never hired for, and they are the most common reason a capable hire quietly does not work out.
Can a role be reshaped around the person in it?
More often than most teams assume. Once the tasks are separated out, it usually turns out that two or three of them are doing most of the damage, and that they are movable. Shifting those, or changing when and how they are done, is frequently the difference between someone leaving and someone staying and doing the best work of their career.
What about the people already on the team?
That is where it pays back fastest. Hiring is the expensive way to solve a fit problem. The same view of tasks and conditions applied to a team you already have will usually show you work that is sitting with the wrong person, and a swap that costs nothing and changes everything.
What you get
- A position description built from the actual tasks and the human skills they need, not a list of gatekeeping requirements.
- The working conditions the role currently demands, made explicit, with the ones that are genuinely fixed separated from the ones that are not.
- Candidates matched on strengths and conditions, with the reasoning shown, so you can disagree with it.
- The same view applied to roles you already have filled.
Start with one role.
Bring a position description you are about to advertise, or one you have filled twice and lost twice. About fifteen minutes.