The slog.
It's a symptom, and it points somewhere specific.

It shouldn't be, and it doesn't have to be. In my experience the slog is the result of not doing it properly.

That sounds blunt, so here are both ends of it, because the slog shows up in 2 completely different shapes and most businesses only recognise one of them.

The first end is the flood.

You have a role to fill, so you write an ad that sells the world. Great culture, real ownership, all of it. It goes out wide, because wide feels safe, and 1,000 applications come back.

Then you spend a fortnight screening out 99% of them, because the job doesn't match up to what those people were told they were applying for.

That's the ad doing its job on the wrong people. The role was never described, it was advertised, and those are two different things. Everyone who applied responded honestly to what you put in front of them, and every one of them now has a view about your business.

The second end is quieter, and it costs a lot more.

There's a role that has turned over 5 times in 2 years. The market knows. People in an industry talk to each other, and they know which roles chew people up, so the ones you want stop looking at it.

The manager has just about had enough, which is fair, because they've done this 5 times and they're the one carrying it each time.

So the company decides to throw money at the problem. Except no one in the market knows about the role, or about the company, or about why this time would be any different.

Money doesn't fix a reputation and it doesn't fix a role that was never properly defined. It raises the cost of the same outcome.

What both ends have in common.

Both are the result of a decision that didn't get made early enough.

In the first, nobody decided what the role actually was before it went to market. In the second, nobody decided why the last 5 people left before hiring the 6th.

Both of those are short conversations that no one owns, so they never happen, and the cost turns up months later looking like bad luck.

What doing it properly looks like.

Decide what you're actually looking for before anyone reaches for the last job description and adds a salary to it. The question is what the job is now, not who the last person was.

Make sure the interview echoes the advert. If someone reads about ownership and autonomy, then sits across from an interviewer who hasn't read their CV and can't tell them what happens next, you have taught them something true about your business, and it isn't the thing you meant to teach them.

Have one process, not two. Ask yourself honestly whether a referral goes through the same steps as an application. If it doesn't, you should be able to say why out loud.

Make sure whoever is in the room knows their part in it. Explaining the next step, selling the business, assessing one specific thing. They should know which one, and everyone should be working off the same sheet.

None of that needs a system or a transformation. It needs someone to sit down and look at all the moving parts, work out how the business wants to show up and why, and bring everyone along with them. It's very simple but understandably not easy, because there are a lot of parts and a lot of people to galvanise.

That's the fun part.

If it feels like a slog, that's the diagnosis.

If your hiring feels like a slog, the slog is information. It's telling you where the process broke, and it broke earlier than the part that hurts.

The flood tells you the role was never defined. The empty pipeline tells you the market has already made up its mind about something you haven't looked at. Neither of those gets solved at shortlist stage, which is exactly where most businesses try to solve it.

Doing it properly up front only feels slower.

The argument, stage by stage: it's a process problem Score your own hiring in 5 minutes