Know Your Role

We have all seen it: roles that evolve faster than the job description. The wish list for the dream hire (strategic and analytical) doesn’t match what the company actually needs (tactical and transactional). The employer often realizes this before the hire is made, but the job post never catches up and candidates are still applying for the wish job.

Consider Both Sides

Employer perspective

After an extensive search and thousands of dollars spent, you finally find a candidate who feels like the one, even though the role has already shifted into something far simpler and more transactional than what was originally advertised. You move forward anyway, trusting their potential.

Once they start, it’s clear the redefined work doesn’t play to their strengths. The work you are assigning is exactly what the company needs and someone has to do it, but it isn’t getting done the way you expected. They try to explain that the job isn’t what they thought they were stepping into. After investing in training, and countless hours trying to bridge the gap, you watch them quietly disengage and eventually walk away. You’re right back at the beginning, repeating the search you thought you’d finished.

New employee perspective

You finally land the offer, the one that feels almost unreal in a market where good roles are scarce. But soon after starting, it becomes clear the job you accepted isn’t the job you’re doing. The magic fades into frustration.

Management assures you it’s just growing pains, yet months pass with no real change. Your strongest skills sit unused, your engagement slips, and you quietly reopen your job search. Eventually, the moment something even slightly better appears, you take it.

To Avoid This Dance, Employers Can:

1. Ask themselves these three questions before posting the role:

• What tasks will this person actually do in their first 90 days?

• Is this work strategic or transactional?

• Are we hiring for what we need today or what we hope to need later?

2. Communicate any change to the scope immediately, including to candidates already in the pipeline.

3. Match the hire to the work. Hiring a finance manager to do AP cleanup and collections calls is not a great use of their skills or your money.

4. Hire someone who wants to do the job that exists today, not the job you hope to need in a year or two.

Employees Also Have Responsibility

Candidates need to know the red flags and the questions that expose them. A few to start with:

• Can you walk me through what my first 90 days would look like? What tasks will I be doing most often?

• What problem is this role solving for you right now?

• Has the scope of the role changed at all since it was posted?

Be mindful of future promises. When you hear phrases like ‘the role will evolve’ or ‘you’ll grow into more responsibility,’ follow up by asking whether that evolution leads toward the work you want or into something else altogether.

The goal is to get the employer to describe the real job: not the posted job, not the imagined job, and not the aspirational job.