Hiring for your team: find the gap before you write the job

Before you hire for a team, map what the team does and who does it, then decide which kind of gap you’re filling: more capacity for work you already do, a capability nobody has, or cover for something only one person can do. Each needs a different job description, different must-haves and a different interview. Most teams skip this step and hire a copy of the last person who left, or of the person they like best.

This guide gives you a one-page team map, a way to name the gap, what the research on team composition does and doesn’t support, and how to turn the gap into requirements.

Why teams hire the wrong thing

Three habits cause most of it:

• Replacing the last person. Someone leaves, and the old job description is reposted. But the team has changed since that person was hired, and some of their work has probably moved to others already.
• Cloning the best person. “Find me another Priya.” Priya’s strengths are already on the team. A second Priya adds capacity, which may be what you need, but often it isn’t.
• Hiring for similarity. Sociologist Lauren Rivera (2012), studying hiring at elite U.S. professional-services firms, found that employers sought candidates culturally similar to themselves, and that concerns about shared culture “often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity”. Our article on culture fit and other hiring assumptions covers that research.

All three skip the same question: what does the team need now?

Step 1: Map the team’s work

List the recurring work your team does, not the job titles. For each item, write who does it, who could cover it, and whether it’s under strain. It takes half an hour on one page.

Here’s an invented example from Larkspur Partners, the fictional accounting practice used throughout our guides, before it decided to hire a Senior Accountant. The work below is its own books and three bookkeeping clients:

Work	Done by	Backup	Under strain?
Month-end close, own books	Managing partner	None	Yes: finishes on day 9, partner’s time
Month-end close, three clients	Managing partner	None	Yes: clients waiting
Bookkeeping and payables	Bookkeeper	Office manager	No
Audit preparation	Managing partner	Senior partner	Seasonal
Advisory work for clients	Both partners	—	Yes: crowded out by the close
Explaining results to clients	Both partners	—	No

Step 2: Name the gap

Read the map and decide which kind of gap you’re filling. It’s usually one of four:

Gap type	What it looks like on the map	What it means for the hire
Capacity	Work the team does well but can’t keep up with	Requirements close to the people already doing it; quick ramp-up matters
Capability	Work nobody does, or does badly	Requirements the team can’t easily judge; get an outside view of what good looks like
Cover	Work only one person can do, with no backup	Overlap with that person is the point; plan for them to train the hire
Leadership	Work needs direction, not more hands	Evidence of having led similar work; the team should help assess it

Larkspur’s map shows a cover gap and a capacity gap in the same place: only the managing partner can run the close, and it’s crowding out advisory work. That points to a hire who can own the close from early on, which is why “has run a month-end close independently” became a must-have, and why audit preparation, also partner-only, became a nice-to-have rather than being ignored.

Naming the gap also tells you what not to require. A capacity hire who can do the core work doesn’t need the extras your best person has. A capability hire shouldn’t be judged on how closely they resemble the people already there.

What the research says about team composition

Research on how a team’s make-up relates to its performance is real but easy to over-read. Two meta-analyses, which combine many earlier studies, are the most useful starting points:

• Personality and ability. Across studies of real workplace teams, Bell (2007) found that “team minimum agreeableness and team mean conscientiousness, openness to experience, collectivism, and preference for teamwork emerged as strong predictors of team performance in field studies”, while in laboratory teams personality effects were negligible. One reading is that a single person who is hard to work with can matter more than the team’s average.
• Background diversity. In a later meta-analysis, Bell, Villado, Lukasik, Belau and Briggs (2011) found that variety in functional background, meaning people who have done different kinds of work, had “a small positive relationship with general team performance as well as with team creativity and innovation”, strongest for design and product development teams. Race and sex diversity had small negative relationships with team performance, and age diversity was unrelated.

Four cautions before using any of this:

1. These are team-level averages. They describe teams, not what any one hire will do to yours.
2. The effects are mostly small. They’re a reason to think about the mix, not a formula for it.
3. Never select on demographics. Choosing or rejecting someone because of race, sex, age or another protected characteristic is unlawful in most places, whatever a study found about team averages.
4. Don’t turn it into personality testing. If working well with others matters, and it usually does, assess it the way you assess anything else: with specific, job-related questions asked of everyone, in a structured interview.

The practical takeaway from the functional-background finding is the most useful: someone who has done different work from the rest of the team can add more than another person with the same background, especially in work that depends on new ideas.

Step 3: Turn the gap into requirements

Write the must-haves from the gap, not from the last job description:

• Capacity: the core work, written as evidence (“has run a month-end close independently”). Keep the list short; the team can teach the rest.
• Capability: what the missing work requires, checked with someone who does it well elsewhere. Your team can’t judge expertise it doesn’t have, so lean on a work sample.
• Cover: the specific tasks the single person does, so the overlap is real.
• Leadership: evidence of having led similar work, not of having held a title.

Then write the job description around the gap: how to write a job description has a structure, and must-have vs nice-to-have has a test for each requirement.

Step 4: Involve the team, in the right way

The people the new hire will work with know things about the job that you don’t. But unstructured team involvement, such as a casual lunch followed by a vote, brings back the similarity problem.

Involve them where they add the most:

• In the map. Ask the team to fill in Step 1 with you. They’ll know where the strain really is.
• In the work sample. A team member who does the work is the best person to design a realistic exercise and judge the result.
• In the interview, with structure. Give each team interviewer specific criteria to rate, with evidence, before any discussion.
• Not as a veto on feel. Concerns should be tied to a criterion. Our guide to making the final hiring decision covers who decides and how to collect everyone’s ratings fairly.

Where SortTheStack fits

SortTheStack reads every application against the requirements you set for the job, so once you’ve named the gap and written the must-haves, every applicant is judged on those and not on how much they resemble the last hire. Plans include unlimited team members, so the people who’ll work with the new hire can see the same evidence and comment on each candidate. See how the screening works.

Sources

• Bell, S. T. (2007). Deep-level composition variables as predictors of team performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 595–615. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.595
• Bell, S. T., Villado, A. J., Lukasik, M. A., Belau, L., & Briggs, A. L. (2011). Getting specific about demographic diversity variable and team performance relationships: A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 37(3), 709–743. doi.org/10.1177/0149206310365001
• Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American Sociological Review, 77(6), 999–1022. doi.org/10.1177/0003122412463213