Stop Hiring Against Experience. Hire Against Outcomes.

Experience. Track record. The right background. They're useful. And that's what most hiring still runs on. They're just not the same thing as future performance.

So what should you hire against? Outcomes.

• Not a better job description.

• Not a longer list of requirements.

• A clear definition of success.

Before the search begins, you decide what this person needs to have achieved in 12 months for everyone to agree the hire worked.

Then everything is built around that.

• The brief.

• The search.

• The shortlist.

• The interview process.

• The assessment.

The hire gets clearer because everyone is solving for the same thing. And the risk becomes measurable because success was defined before the search started.

Instead of starting with a candidate profile, we start with the business outcome and work backwards.

And once you start thinking that way, it's hard to ignore something else. Why should the client carry all of the hiring risk?

Traditional recruitment is largely paid when a placement is made.

My fee is spread across the first year and tied to the person staying and contributing over that period.

Not because I can guarantee performance. I can't.

But if I'm asking a client to take hiring risk seriously, I should be willing to carry some of it too.

Outcome-based hiring isn't built around making a placement.

It's built around whether the hire actually works.

If you've got a role where the cost of getting it wrong is high, it might be worth starting with a different question:

What would success look like 12 months after this person joins?