Type: regular Meta Title: The First Hire Question Founders Should Ask Before They Post
When I made my first hire years ago, I posted the job, talked to three candidates, picked the one I liked most, and started onboarding the next Monday. Six months later we parted ways. The candidate was fine. The setup was not.
The question I did not answer before posting that role was simple. What does this person need to be able to decide without checking with me, and what do they need to escalate? I had not written that down. I had not even thought about it clearly. So when the hire started, every decision became a conversation, and I ended up doing my old job plus managing someone else's attempt to do it.
That question is the cleanest diagnostic for whether you are ready to hire. If you cannot list five decisions the new person will own and five decisions that get escalated, you are not ready. You will hire them and you will end up frustrated. The candidate is not the problem. The decision authority is the problem.
The math also gets sharper once you write the document. About forty percent of the time, I have watched founders work through this exercise and conclude they did not actually need to hire. They needed a better calendar app, or they needed to stop saying yes to work that did not pay enough to justify a hire. The exercise saves them six figures.
The other sixty percent of the time, the exercise reveals what the hire actually needs to be. Sometimes the role they thought they needed (a marketing person) becomes something different (a project manager who happens to handle marketing) once the decision authority is mapped. The job description was always a wrapper around an unclear set of expectations. Writing the expectations first surfaces the real role.
I do this exercise now before every hire and I make my clients do it before theirs. The format is one page. Daily and weekly rhythm of the role. Decisions the hire owns unilaterally. Decisions that need a check-in. Decisions that get escalated. Success criteria at 30, 60, and 90 days in numbers. Relationship map inside the company and outside.
The candidates who get the document during the interview tell you something useful about their fit. Strong candidates read it carefully and push back on the parts they disagree with. Weak candidates skim it and tell you they are flexible. The conversation that follows is also better, because both sides are working from the same description of the role rather than from the same set of buzzwords on a job post.
For Nashville founders specifically, the local talent market makes the document even more valuable. The candidate pool has plenty of people who can do the work, but the gap between a strong fit and a wrong fit is usually invisible in a one-hour interview. The document closes most of that gap by giving you something concrete to evaluate against. If you cannot write the document, hire a consultant for three hours to help you write it. The investment returns the moment your first real hire actually works.
The honest framing is that hiring is a system problem before it is a people problem. Solve the system first. The people problem mostly takes care of itself.
