A role can become hard to fill when the hiring requirements don’t match what one candidate can realistically bring. Focus on the three most important skills, separate must-haves from what can be learned, and make sure the salary reflects the level of responsibility.
When your hiring wish list doesn’t match reality, the role can quickly become hard to fill.
You start with the core responsibilities, add in a few useful extras, someone else gets involved and adds a requirement, then you think about everything the last person handled and add that too.
Before long, the list describes an exceptional candidate. Finding them is the problem.
When a role is hard to fill, it’s easy to assume the market’s the issue. Sometimes the better question is whether what you’re asking for matches the reality of the role, the salary and the people you’re likely to find.
How did the role get this big?
Roles rarely become complicated overnight.
It happens most with long-standing employees. Their role doesn’t stay still. They learn new systems, take on more, build relationships and become the person who knows how things work. The business changes and they change with it.
Eventually, the job they’re doing can look very different from the one they were originally hired to do.
Then they leave, and everything they’ve accumulated over the years gets written into the job description for the next person.
That’s when it’s worth asking: did they have all those skills when you hired them?
You can’t hire years of knowledge
I saw this with a secretary who’d been with a business as it grew, then stayed on when it was acquired by a larger company.
She trained for board-level work, but kept many of the responsibilities she’d been doing before. Years in, she knew it all: the office, the systems, the people, the history. She even knew how the cleaning roster worked.
Then booked a three month holiday and the business needed a temp. That’s when the problem became obvious.
They needed someone who could step into board-level support, understand the office, handle a wide range of day-to-day responsibilities and somehow pick up years of business knowledge.
Years of knowledge, expected from day one.
She could do all of it. She just hadn’t started out able to.
Replace the role, not the person
When a good employee leaves, wanting someone just like them is understandable. But a carbon copy is usually the wrong goal.
Some responsibilities landed with that person because they were particularly good at them. Others because they were reliable and said yes. Some tasks may not need to sit in the role anymore. And a lot of what they know simply comes from being there for a long time.
So go back to why the role exists now. Ask yourself:
- What are the three things this person genuinely needs to do well?
- What do they need to know or be able to do from day one?
- What could they reasonably learn once they’re in the role?
Then look at the requirements. Do they need to know your exact software, or could someone learn it? Do they need experience in your industry specifically, or would relevant experience transfer?
Some qualifications and technical skills genuinely need to be there from day one. Keep those.
To ensure you aren’t creating a hard to fill role keep in mind that every preference doesn’t need to become a must-have.
The more boxes someone has to tick, the smaller your candidate pool gets.
Look at the combination
These are the areas where broad support roles can be particularly hard to fill.
- Executive support
- Office management
- Bookkeeping
- HR administration
- Reporting
- Events
- Process improvement
Each one sounds reasonable on its own.
The question is whether you’re likely to find all of them in one person, at the level you need.
Someone with strong bookkeeping experience may have built their career in finance, not executive support. A good EA might be comfortable handling expenses and invoices but have no interest in taking responsibility for payroll. A strong office manager may not have board-level EA experience.
None of them is necessarily the wrong candidate.
You just need to decide which experience matters most.
Has the salary kept up with the role?
Responsibilities get added but the salary doesn’t always follow.
A job that started as administration support might now include executive support, payroll deadlines, reporting, operations and project responsibilities.
If you’re asking for experience across several specialist areas, candidates will look at whether the salary reflects that.
The highest salary doesn’t always win. Flexibility, culture, development and the work itself matter too; however, what you’re asking someone to take responsibility for and what you’re offering in return need to make sense together. If you’re unsure, review our salary guide.
Still struggling to find the right person?
A thin shortlist doesn’t automatically mean the right candidates aren’t out there. Check what’s genuinely essential, what came from the last person and whether the salary still meets the market.
Then think about your best long-term people. They know more and do more now than they did on day one. A candidate who nails your top three and can grow into the rest could be a stronger hire than waiting for someone who matches every line.
The person who left might tick every box today.
They probably didn’t tick them all when you hired them.
If your shortlist is thin and it’s obvious this is a hard to fill role, we can help review this before you advertise it again.
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