Last updated: September 15, 2026
By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1
A job description is the blueprint for a hire, not the finished house. It gives a search its structure, but the right candidate may bring strengths, experience, and possibilities the hiring team didn’t know to ask for. Treat it as where the search starts, not the answer.
“Why can’t I find the right person?”
I hear it constantly. Usually it arrives with a second one stapled to it. The role has been open for three months, so what are we doing wrong?
Sometimes nothing is wrong with the search. Something is wrong with the drawing we started from.
Twenty-five years plus in recruiting, most of it on marketing, creative, media, and entertainment searches, and on nearly every call like that I wind up repeating myself. The job description is the blueprint. It’s not the finished house. It’s where we start. Then we get into the search, talk to real people, learn who’s actually out there, and what we thought we needed at the beginning starts to shift. I think that’s okay! Honestly, it might be the whole point.
A quick note on where you’re reading this. I recruit for KORE1’s marketing recruiters practice, so I have an obvious stake in how companies hire. KORE1 has been around since 2005 and recruits in 30-some U.S. metro areas. None of what follows requires hiring a recruiter, though. Most of it is a conversation you could have with your own team this afternoon.
Why I Call It a Blueprint
A job description gives you the structure of a role: what the person owns, who they work with, and what success should look like a year in. It can’t tell you who will walk through the door. The right candidate may bring strengths the blueprint never drew, and a good search leaves room for them.
Blueprints are useful. Nobody builds a house without one. But have you ever watched a house actually go up? The plan moves. The builder opens a wall and finds something nobody expected, or the owners stand in the half-framed kitchen and realize the window belongs on the other side. Nobody calls that a failure. It’s just building.
Hiring works the same way, except we tend to treat the job description like a signed contract. Every line becomes a requirement. Every requirement becomes a filter. And three months later we’re still looking for someone who may not exist.
Most Blueprints Are Traced From Somebody Else’s House
Think about how the last job description at your company got written. Somebody pulled up the posting from the last time the role was open, or the description for the person who just left, or a competitor’s listing that looked about right. Then everyone in the approval chain added the one thing they cared about. Nobody took anything out.
That’s how a creative director posting ends up asking for a decade of agency experience, in-house brand experience, a specific category, broadcast production, social-first campaigns, team leadership, and hands-on design chops, all in one human being. Each line made sense to whoever wrote it. Together they describe someone who has had four careers. Maybe five. It’s one of the first things I look at when a creative director search has stalled.
The research on this is not kind. In Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, a 2021 study from Harvard Business School and Accenture, 88% of employers agreed that qualified high-skills candidates get screened out because they don’t match the exact criteria in the job description. For middle-skills workers it was 94%. Employers said that. About their own process.
Degree requirements are the classic version. Another Harvard Business School report, Dismissed by Degrees, looked at 26 million job postings and found that in 2015, 67% of production supervisor postings asked for a college degree while only 16% of the people doing that job had one. Production supervisors aren’t my world. The pattern is. I see the creative version constantly, just with brand names and categories where the diploma used to be.
Load-Bearing Walls and Movable Ones
So which lines are load-bearing? That’s the real question, and the answer changes with every role. Here’s roughly how I sort them when a client and I sit down with a description that isn’t working.
| What the posting asks for | Load-bearing? | The question I ask instead |
|---|---|---|
| A body of work or portfolio | Almost always | Does the work show judgment we’d trust with our brand? |
| Years of experience | Rarely, as a number | What should this person have already done at least once? |
| A specific category, like beauty, gaming, or streaming | Sometimes | Is that knowledge hard to learn, or just comfortable to hire? |
| Agency or in-house background | Sometimes | Does the role need someone who has sat on the client side, the agency side, or both? |
| A particular software stack | Rarely | Could a strong candidate learn our tools in their first month? |
| A degree | Rarely | Would we really turn down a great portfolio over it? |
| The title someone holds today | Rarely | Is their actual scope bigger or smaller than the title suggests? |
| Managing a team | Depends on the role | Will they manage people on day one, or a year from now? |
Look at what usually lands in the load-bearing column. The work. How someone thinks. Whether they can do the thing the role exists to do. What’s movable is mostly the packaging around it.
I’ll be honest, though. A requirement that looks movable sometimes isn’t. If you need a media buyer running programmatic budgets in week one, somebody who has only ever bought linear TV is a real risk, however much you like them. Some walls hold the roof up. The job is figuring out which ones. If you want to see a shorter, tighter requirements section on paper, the template we put together for product marketing managers is a decent example of the shape.
Let the Search Talk Back
I love this part. Once a search is live, every conversation teaches you something about the blueprint.
You talk to five strong candidates and all five ask the same question about who the role reports to. That’s information. Three people you really liked pass after the first interview. Information. The best person you’ve met came from a different industry entirely, and you can’t stop thinking about them. Biggest clue of the lot, that one, and teams tend to wave it off because it doesn’t match the drawing.
One search I ran before KORE1 still shapes how I think about this. A fast-growing gaming and consumer beverage brand had just taken on investment and needed a Director of eCommerce, a role they’d been trying to fill for some time. The job sat right between two worlds. It needed someone who understood gaming culture and someone who understood how a consumer product actually gets sourced, made, shipped, and sold. On paper that’s two different people from two different industries. It isn’t. It’s one person who has lived in both, and searching either industry alone would never have turned them up. Filling that role quickly turned into roughly six hires in about six months, across eCommerce, sourcing and contract manufacturing, partnerships, and Amazon account management.
Timing plays into all of this. A new role with responsive hiring managers can close in two to three weeks. A role that has already been open a while, where the internal search didn’t land, usually takes one to two months, partly because the first job is working out why it didn’t land. Very often the answer is sitting right there in the description. Not always. More often than you’d think. If the team also wants the next search to move faster, our guide to cutting time to hire covers the process side.
Great candidates aren’t the scarce part, by the way. We can always find great candidates. Whether they’re ready to make a move in a market like this one is the bigger question, and a posting that reads like a checklist hands a happily employed person one more reason to stay put.
Candidates Take Your Requirements Literally
You might write “10+ years” as a loose signal. The person reading it treats it as a rule.
There’s a figure from an internal Hewlett Packard report that gets quoted everywhere: men apply for a job when they meet about 60% of the qualifications, and women apply only when they meet all of them. Tara Mohr wanted to know why, so she surveyed more than a thousand professionals, most of them American, and published what she found in Harvard Business Review. It wasn’t confidence. “I didn’t think I could do the job well” came in dead last as a top reason, picked by roughly 10% of women and 12% of men. People held back because they believed the list of qualifications meant exactly what it said.
Think about who that screens out. Not the people who can’t do the work. The careful ones, the ones who take your words seriously. In marketing and creative roles, those are very often the people you’d want looking after your brand.
What I Want to Know First
When a search stalls, I don’t start by editing the description. I ask questions. Lots. I always say the more you tell me, the better job I can do for you. A handful of these I end up asking on nearly every stuck search. It’s the same reason a retained executive search opens with a long intake conversation before anyone writes a posting.
- Is the person we’re describing actually out there? Have we met even one?
- Which of these must-haves would we give up for the right person? Be honest.
- What could we gain by looking at someone a little differently?
- Is this the right title? A manager title on a director-sized job quietly tells strong people it isn’t for them.
- Is the pay in line with what we’re asking for? If nobody’s sure, the salary benchmark assistant is a quick first check.
- Should we look at candidates from other industries, and which backgrounds would really translate?
- And the one nobody enjoys. Is something about the company, or the process, turning good people away?
Every so often a client just says it out loud. “I don’t think we actually know what we’re looking for.” I love hearing it. It means we can finally start.
This Isn’t Lowering the Bar
Pushback on this comes up more than on anything else I say, so let me be really clear. Looking past the blueprint isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about being open enough to consider someone you wouldn’t have looked at before. Big difference.
Finding the right candidate is part science and part instinct. The science is real. I read resumes carefully. Experience and qualifications give you the data. But a resume tells you where someone has been, not where they can go. I can glance at a resume after all this time and tell you pretty quickly what someone has done, where they did it, and roughly how big it was, but what they’ll do next isn’t anywhere on the page. That part takes conversation, curiosity, and a little bit of gut.
I recruited for one entertainment marketing agency for more than a decade, placing creative directors, motion designers, producers, and project managers. Several of those people stayed for years. One of them ended up running the place, as president. I promise you that wasn’t on anybody’s job description.
When the Blueprint Should Stay Exactly as Drawn
Sometimes it should. Some requirements really are fixed, and pretending otherwise would be a lie you’d see straight through.
If a media company just picked up a new account and needs senior people in seats fast, there may be no time for anyone to grow into the role, and no client is going to wait patiently while a promising strategist learns how their business works. That calls for somebody who’s already done it. The blueprint is probably right. What helps then is speed and a tight, honest list of must-haves, usually run as a direct hire search so nobody wastes a month on maybes.
The real test is whether anyone can say why a requirement is there. If nobody in the room can explain a line in one sentence, it probably isn’t holding anything up.
Straight Answers for Stuck Searches
Do I Need to Change the Job Description, or Change What I’m Looking For?
Usually what you’re looking for, and the description follows. Rewording a posting without changing the thinking behind it gets you a nicer-sounding version of the same search. Start with the must-haves. Once you know what you’d genuinely give up, the description almost rewrites itself.
How Can I Tell if My Requirements Are Too Specific?
Count the people you’ve met who check every box. If that number is still zero after a few weeks of real searching, the list is probably describing someone who doesn’t exist. Another tell is when every strong candidate is missing a different item, which usually means the items were never the point.
Is the Title Really That Big a Deal?
Bigger than most people expect. Candidates search by title and judge the scope of a job by it before they read a word of the description. Post a director-level role as a manager and the directors scroll past while people who aren’t ready yet apply. Fixing it costs nothing.
Should We Consider Candidates From a Different Industry?
Often, and some of my favorite placements came from exactly that. Ask what the person truly needs to know on day one versus what a smart hire picks up in their first few months. Category knowledge is sometimes essential. Just as often it’s simply familiar.
How Long Should a Search Run Before We Revisit the Blueprint?
Two to three weeks is a normal close for a new role with responsive hiring managers. If you’re well past that and nothing is moving, look hard at the description. For a role that already failed internally, plan on one to two months, and question the blueprint at the start of that search rather than the end.
Pick One Line and Defend It
One question, then I’ll let you go. Which line on your current job description would you fight hardest to keep, and could you explain why in one sentence?
If you can, great. That line is probably load-bearing. Can’t? Start there. And if you want to talk it through with someone who has stood in a lot of half-framed kitchens, I do this work every day with KORE1’s digital and creative staffing team. Let’s talk. Or come say hi on LinkedIn.
