What Are the 3 Steps to Hire the Right Person?

There are three steps to hiring the right person, and they only work in this order:

1. Build an Ideal Candidate Profile.

2. Get every decision-maker aligned on it before you post anything.

3. Run one consistent process against that profile.

I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since 2020 we've built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US using exactly these three steps. They're the reason we cut average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37. Most hiring problems people blame on the market are actually a missing step one.

Why does hiring fail before the job is even posted?

Because the team never agreed on who they were looking for. That's it. That's the whole thing. When a search drags on for months, the owner usually tells me the market is tough or the resumes are weak. Then I sit down with the four people involved in the decision and hear four different descriptions of the same job.

One person wants five years of experience. Another wants ten. One says remote is fine, one says in office, one says "close enough to the office" and another says an hour away works. Nobody wrote any of it down, so nobody noticed they disagreed.

That isn't recruiting. That's a team arguing with itself and calling it a talent shortage.

What is step one: the Ideal Candidate Profile?

An Ideal Candidate Profile is a written description of the specific person who will succeed in this role — one level deeper than a job description. A job description tells you what the job is. The profile tells you who wins at it.

Think about walking into a dealership and saying "I want a car." Four wheels and an engine? That's every vehicle on the lot. You'd never buy that way. You'd have the details in your head before you walked in — the size, the features, the number you won't go past, the thing you refuse to compromise on. Hiring deserves at least that much specificity, and most job postings don't get it.

A real profile names the outcomes the person owns at 90 days, six months, and a year. It names the experience that genuinely matters versus the experience that just sounds good on paper. It names the non-negotiables, and — this is the part teams skip — the things you're willing to trade away to get the non-negotiables. Every hire is a trade. Deciding the trade in advance is what stops you from re-deciding it emotionally when a charming candidate is sitting in front of you.

What is step two: getting every decision-maker aligned?

Step two is putting everyone with a yes or no in the same room and agreeing on the profile before a single resume is reviewed. Write the list first: who screens resumes, who runs the phone screen, who interviews, who sits on the final panel, and who can veto the offer. Anyone with influence over the outcome belongs on that list, including the people who never show up to meetings but whose opinion the owner quietly weighs at the end.

Then bring them together for what we call a Recruitment Launch Meeting and don't leave until the profile is agreed and written down. If the room can't agree, you've just found the real problem — and you found it for the price of one meeting instead of the price of a great candidate walking away in month three because someone who was never aligned said no. I've written more about the process that protects your business if you want the wider view of where this sits.

What is step three: running one consistent process?

Step three is measuring every candidate against the same written profile, in the same order, every time. Same screening questions. Same interview criteria. Same scoring. Same verification before an offer goes out. The profile stops being a document and becomes the scorecard.

This is where the time savings actually come from. When the criteria are fixed, pre-screening filters mismatches in minutes instead of weeks, and you interview three to five real finalists instead of fifteen maybes. That structural change is what took our average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37 — not working harder, just refusing to restart the definition of the role at every stage.

What happens when you skip these steps?

You get a bad hire, and a bad hire is a six-figure event for a growing business. You pay the salary of someone who doesn't perform, you pay in the productivity of the good people covering for them, you pay in customers who got worse service, and then you pay to do the entire search again. I broke the full arithmetic down in how much a bad hire actually costs your business. The uncomfortable part is that almost every one of those hires was decided before the interview — at the moment nobody wrote the profile.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does building an Ideal Candidate Profile take?

One focused meeting, usually under ninety minutes. That's the cheapest ninety minutes in the entire hire. Compare it to the cost of restarting a search two months in because the panel discovered they wanted different things.

What if the team cannot agree on the profile?

Then the disagreement is the finding, and you should be glad you found it. It was always there. The only question was whether it surfaced in a meeting or as a rejected finalist. Force the trade-offs onto paper: if you can only have one of two things, which one wins? Someone has to own the final call, and everyone needs to know who that is before the search starts.

Does this work for small businesses with no HR department?

It works better. Small teams have fewer people to align, so the meeting is shorter, and they feel a wrong hire far more sharply, so the payoff is bigger. In a ten-person company one seat is ten percent of everything. You don't need an HR department to write down who you're looking for — you need ninety minutes and the discipline to do it before you post.

Should I still do this if I'm using a recruitment agency?

Absolutely, and a good agency will insist on it. If a recruiter takes your job description and promises resumes by tomorrow without asking who actually decides, they're sending you a database dump. The profile is what a real search is built on, and any partner worth their fee will run that meeting with you rather than around you.

If you're about to open a role and you're not certain your team would describe the same person, that's the moment to fix it. Let CPG Recruitment build the profile and run the search with you, get in touch with the CPG team, or contact me directly and tell me about the seat you're trying to fill.