The Criteria You Never Wrote Down Is Why Every Hire Takes Three Months
You've interviewed six people for the same role. None of them felt quite right.
The first one was too junior. The second talked a good game but something was off. The third had the skills but you couldn't picture them with the team. The fourth wanted too much money. The fifth seemed great, then you slept on it and changed your mind.
Now you're three months in, still doing the job yourself, still looking.
Here's the uncomfortable question: did you ever write down what "right" actually looks like?
Not the job ad. The job ad says things like "fast-paced environment" and "excellent communication skills." That's not criteria. That's filler.
I mean the actual decision rules. The specific things that would make you say yes.
Most hiring at small companies works like this: you know you need help, you write something up, you start talking to people, and you evaluate each candidate against a feeling.
The feeling is real. But it shifts.
Candidate two makes you think maybe you need someone more senior than you originally planned. Candidate three makes you wonder if culture fit matters more than experience. Candidate four makes you question the salary band.
By candidate six, you're not evaluating against a standard. You're evaluating against a moving blur of all the previous conversations.
This is why the process takes three months. Not because good people are hard to find. Because you're solving a different puzzle with every interview.
The fix is painfully simple. Before you talk to anyone, write down your criteria. Specific. Weighted. Non-negotiable versus nice-to-have.
Not "good communicator." Something like: "Can explain a complex process to a customer without jargon, in writing, within 24 hours."
Not "culture fit." Something like: "Comfortable working autonomously for 4-5 hour stretches without checking in. Flags problems early rather than waiting until they're urgent."
Not "experienced." Something like: "Has personally handled supplier negotiations, not just assisted. Can show me an example of a deal they improved."
Three to five criteria. Written down. Scored consistently across every candidate.
This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it.
One founder I worked with had been trying to hire an operations manager for four months. Eleven interviews. No hire.
We sat down and I asked her to list, from memory, the top three things she was looking for.
She gave me five things. Then added two more. Then said actually the most important thing was something she hadn't mentioned yet.
Eight criteria, no ranking, some of them contradictory.
We spent an hour forcing the list down to four things, in order. The hard part wasn't adding detail. It was admitting that some things mattered more than others.
She re-interviewed two candidates she'd already passed on. Hired one of them. Still happy with the decision eight months later.
The candidates hadn't changed. The lens had.
Writing criteria down does something else: it shows you where you're actually stuck.
If you can't articulate what good looks like, maybe you don't understand the role well enough yet. Maybe you need to do it yourself for another month before you hand it off.
If your criteria would disqualify everyone at the salary you're offering, that's useful to know now rather than after twenty interviews.
If your top criterion is something you can't assess until someone's been in the job for six weeks, you need a different interview process — maybe a paid trial day, maybe a test project.
The criteria force the thinking.
There's a version of this that also applies to decisions that aren't hiring. Choosing software. Picking a supplier. Deciding whether to take on a new client.
Whenever you find yourself in round three of the same decision, ask: did I ever write down what would make me say yes?
Usually the answer is no. Usually that's the problem.
This is quieter than automation or AI. No one runs a case study on "founder writes down five bullet points before interviews."
But it's the kind of thing that gives you three months back. And more importantly, it gets you out of the loop — because once the criteria exist, someone else can do the first-round screening. Someone else can score the candidates. You're only in the room for the final decision, not every conversation.
That's how you stop being the bottleneck.
If you've got a decision that keeps circling — hiring, vendor, process change — and you suspect the criteria might be the missing piece, that's the sort of thing we help people think through.