Why Do You Keep Hiring the Wrong Person?

You keep hiring the wrong person because you haven't defined the right one. It isn't the position. It isn't that the market's tough right now. It's that going into a hire without total clarity guarantees you'll evaluate candidates against a standard that only exists in your head — and changes every time someone walks through the door. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries since 2020 I can tell you the repeat-offender hiring problem is almost never a people problem. It's a definition problem.

Why is a job description not enough?

A job description lists duties. It doesn't describe the person who will succeed at them, and those are completely different documents. Most job descriptions could be pasted into any company in the same industry without changing a word — which tells you exactly how much they narrow your search.

Here's the comparison I use with owners. Imagine 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 shop that way for a vehicle you'll own for five years. But that's exactly how most companies shop for a person who'll touch every customer, every process and every teammate they have. You need the details. The features. The non-negotiables. Hiring is a bigger commitment than the car, and it usually gets a tenth of the specificity.

What is the unwritten wish list, and why does it break hiring?

The unwritten wish list is the private picture each person on your team carries of the ideal candidate — experience, personality, culture fit, working style — that nobody has ever said out loud. Everyone has one. Nobody knows they have one, because it feels like common sense rather than opinion.

So you all read the same resume and see different people. One person is scanning for tenure. Another is scanning for industry background. A third has already decided this candidate is too junior to command the room, without ever articulating that "commands the room" was a requirement. Getting those lists out of people's heads and onto paper is the entire point of aligning your team before the job goes live.

You're not hiring for one role. You're running three simultaneous searches through one posting and wondering why nothing sticks.

What should you decide before you post the job?

Four things, written down, before a posting goes anywhere:

• The outcomes this person owns — what has to be true at 90 days, six months and a year for this hire to be a win.

• The experience that genuinely predicts success in your environment, as opposed to the experience that just reads well on a resume.

• The true non-negotiables — and there should be two or three, not eleven. If everything is a non-negotiable, nothing is, and you've just described a person who doesn't exist.

• What you're willing to trade away to get the non-negotiables. This is the one teams avoid. Every hire is a trade. Deciding it in advance is what stops you from re-deciding it emotionally when someone charming is sitting across the table.

How specific is specific enough?

Specific enough that two different people reading your profile would shortlist the same resumes. That's the working test, and it's more demanding than it sounds. "Strong communicator" fails it. "Can run a client escalation call without me in the room" passes it, because two people can independently judge whether a candidate has done that.

The other half of the test is subtraction. If a requirement wouldn't change your decision about a real candidate in front of you, take it out. Long requirement lists feel rigorous and actually do the opposite — they hide the three things that matter inside fifteen that don't, so every reviewer picks their own three.

What changes once you get clear?

The search gets dramatically faster, because clarity removes the rework. When the criteria are fixed and shared, pre-screening filters mismatches in minutes, interviews are spent on real finalists, and nobody re-opens the definition of the role in week six. That structural change is what took our average time-to-fill at CPG from 68 days to 37 — not more effort, less re-deciding.

It also gets safer. The wrong hire is the most expensive mistake a growing business makes, and I've broken down exactly what a bad hire costs elsewhere. Clarity is the cheapest insurance available against it. If you want the full sequence, it's laid out in the 3 steps to hire the right person.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is it really never the candidates' fault?

Individual candidates can absolutely be wrong for a role. But if nobody in an entire pipeline is good enough, that's a signal about the criteria, not the market. Either the requirements were never stated clearly, or they contradict each other, or the compensation doesn't match the profile you've described. Blaming the applicant pool keeps the conversation comfortable and the seat empty.

What if I genuinely don't know what I want yet?

That's a normal starting point, and it's fine — as long as you resolve it before you post rather than during interviews. Work backwards from the problem: what isn't getting done today, what would you stop doing yourself, and what does success look like a year from now? The role definition falls out of those answers. What doesn't work is using live candidates to figure it out, because you'll burn good people while you learn.

Can being too specific shrink the pool too far?

Being specific about outcomes never shrinks the pool. Being specific about credentials often does. Say what the person must be able to achieve, stay open on the path they took to get there, and you'll widen the pool and raise the quality bar at the same time.

How often should the profile be revisited?

Every time you open the role, even if you hired for it eighteen months ago. Businesses change faster than job descriptions do. The seat you're refilling is usually not the seat you filled last time, and copying the old posting is how you hire for a company you no longer are.

Where should you start?

Write the definition before the posting, not after, and get everyone with a vote to sign off on it in a single recruitment launch meeting. If you've hired wrong more than once for the same seat, the pattern isn't bad luck. Have CPG Recruitment define the role properly and run the search, start on the CPG for-employers page, or message me directly and describe the role you keep struggling to fill.