GNT #180: What your job posting tells you

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For years, small and midsize companies have called me when their marketing isn't working. Before I look at anything else, I ask to see the last job posting they wrote for the role. It tells me almost everything.

It usually reads like this. Set the strategy. Run the campaigns. Build and maintain the website. Own the email list and the social channels. Pull the analytics and report on them. Own the whole customer journey, from the first click to the renewal.

One person. And the salary listed at the bottom is a single mid-level wage, for work that is really three or four separate jobs.

By the time they call me, they have already hired for that role once or twice. Someone capable took it, worked flat out for a year, and left. They are sure they keep picking the wrong person.

They don't. The job can't be filled, not well, because it was never one job.

This is a very similar conundrum that I write about here almost every week. This week it showed up wearing a job posting.

If you run a small or midsize company, you have probably written a version of that role. And if you run a business of one, you are living it: the only marketing person, and the only everyone else person with the same impossible stack.

Today I want to show you why this job always breaks, and exactly what fixes it before you post it (or, if the job is yours, before you plan your week). You don't fix it by hiring harder. You fix it by deciding what the job actually is.

Let's get to it.

Count the jobs hiding inside that one posting.

Strategy is one job. Deciding what to say, to whom, and why. Senior work. A job about deciding.

Execution is a different job. Building the campaigns, writing the emails, shipping the posts. A job about doing, and a good doer doesn't have to be senior to be excellent at it.

The website is a specialist job. So is real analytics. So is lifecycle. Each one is somebody's whole career.

So the posting isn't a role. It's a senior strategist, a full-time doer, and two or three specialists, described as one person and paid like one mid-level hire. Nobody is all of those at once, and the market knows it. That is why the role churns.

Capability without a filter

Nobody wrote that posting out of carelessness. They wrote it because they could imagine one person doing all of it. And you can. Somewhere there is a heroic marketer who could technically touch every line.

That is the same trap that catches the most capable person on any team.

When someone can do everything, they tend to do everything. Not because they should, but because they can, and because nobody drew a line that said stop. Capability feels like an asset right up until it becomes the reason nothing has an edge. Someone with no filter for what they should do keeps taking on more until they break. A job written the same way breaks the same way, only faster, because the whole impossible stack is sitting there on one page where you can see it.

Capability without a filter is the problem, at the level of a person and at the level of a role.

Nobody hands you the edges

In a big company you never have to write that impossible posting, because the lines are already drawn. The org chart says this is marketing's job and that is product's. The budget caps how many people you get and at what level. The ladder says a strategist decides and a coordinator executes. You inherit a role with the edges already in place.

The smaller the company, the fewer of those edges exist, until in a business of one there are none at all. No org chart, no budget forcing the tradeoff. No boss upstairs ruling that marketing does not, in fact, also build and maintain the website. Whatever edges you don't inherit, you draw yourself. And a job with no edges doesn't get simpler. It swallows everything within reach.

Define the job before you fill it

The fix isn't a better posting or a bigger budget. It's to decide what the job is before you fill it. Three moves.

Separate deciding from doing. Strategy is a decision. Execution is a task. Different kinds of work, different levels, and you almost never get both, done well, in one affordable body. Stop buying them stacked. A focused doer who owns the execution, plus an experienced advisor for the strategy, beats one overwhelmed generalist every time, and usually costs less.

Name the one thing that moves the business. Not the ten things the role could touch. The one thing that, if it went well this year, would matter more than the rest combined. Maybe it's a single channel. Maybe it's the one place the funnel is leaking. Staff that, and let the job be good at it.

Let the rest be someone else's, or no one's. The hard one. Everything you leave out still has to go somewhere. The website goes to a specialist you hire for a month. The analytics go to a contractor. And some of it goes on a list of things you are not doing right now, and you honor that list. A job description is as much about what you keep out as what you put in.

And if you're the whole department, you run this on yourself. You can't hire the rest away, but you can still name the one thing your job is this quarter, and put the rest on the not-now list.

Takeaway

The role you can't fill is usually three or four jobs wearing one title, written by capability that never got a filter.

So before you post it, don't ask who could do all of this.

Ask what the job is actually for. What is the one thing it has to get right?

Answer that, and most of the list falls away on its own.

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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