Pull up the job description you're using right now. Read it line by line. Not for what it says — for where each line came from.
Some of those requirements, you can name the person they came from. The guy who couldn't communicate with his crew. The one who said the drive was too long. The hire who took four months to learn your software.
That's the test. If you can name the guy the requirement came from, it isn't a standard. It's a scar.
Today we're talking about what happens when you hire against your last bad experience instead of for the job you actually need done.
They accumulate.
You had a job description once. Then something went sideways, and the week after that you added a line. Then something else went sideways. Another line. Nobody sat down and built this on purpose. It grew, one bad experience at a time.
And let me be fair, because I'm not telling you every line on it came from a wound. A lot of it is just the work. If you're in snow and ice management, availability during a storm isn't a scar. That's the job. If somebody's running a spray truck, the license or certification isn't a scar either. That's the law.
But go down the list. A few of those lines, you know exactly where they came from. You added them on a Monday. And they've been screening people out ever since.
Here's what I want you to understand about those lines. They're not unreasonable. That's what makes this hard. Every one of them is a rational response to something that actually happened to you. You're not being picky. You're protecting yourself.
The problem isn't that you're wrong about the past. It's what you're doing with it.
Should You Use ChatGPT for Job Descriptions?
Everything else today comes back to this. That requirement on your job description isn't a need. It's a fix.
A need is: "My crew leader has to be able to communicate with his crew." A fix is: "Must be bilingual." A need is: "I want somebody who'll still be here in three years." A fix is: "Must live within twenty-five minutes."
You didn't write down what the job requires. You wrote down the solution to the last time it went wrong.
So when you post it, you're not screening for the person who can do the work. You're screening for the person who doesn't have last year's problem. Those are two different people. And you can absolutely end up hiring the second one.
That's the cost nobody counts. It isn't only that the search takes longer. It's that the search is pointed in the wrong direction. Four months in, you seat somebody who's worse at the job and just happens to lack the one trait that annoyed you about the guy before.
Let me walk through what our team at BR1 runs into.
That's usually the whole story behind a commute radius.
Two people got hired, worked a while, and left. On the way out, they said the drive got to be too much. So now there's a rule, and anybody past a certain number of miles doesn't get a call.
Think about what that's built on. Two people.
Meanwhile our team talks to people every week who'd make that drive without blinking. Because the job's worth it. Because they've been driving a longer one for years. Because they're planning to move anyway and nobody ever asked. You will never hear from any of them. They're gone before anyone reads the rest of their background.
Two exits turned into a permanent filter on your entire market.
This is the big one, and it shows up as two different lines on the same job description.
The first is experience on a specific system. Somebody took forever to pick up your software, so now it's a requirement. In a lot of markets that person barely exists — and you could have taught it in three weeks. You turned a training cost into a wall.
The second is more experience than the job actually requires. Five years. Seven. Ten. Somebody green cost you a client once, so the number went up. But you never needed five years. You needed somebody who wouldn't cost you a client, and a number doesn't tell you that. Years tell you how long he's been doing it. They don't tell you whether he got better, or whether what he learned somewhere else works here. Plenty of people get to five years by doing the same season five times.
So here's the question to ask about every requirement on your job description. Could I teach this in a month? If the answer's yes, it isn't a requirement. It's a preference. And you're paying for it in months of an empty seat.
I'm spending extra time here, because it's one of the most common ones in our world and it shows exactly what I'm talking about.
Start with this. The need is real. If your crews speak Spanish and your crew lead can't, that's a safety problem and a quality problem and it will cost you. I'm not waving that away.
But look at what you did with it. You had a real need. You found one solution. Then you wrote the solution into the job description as a requirement. And now every crew lead in your market who can't do it is invisible to you — including the ones who are better than your current guy at everything else on that list.
The solution set is also bigger than it was a few years ago. There are earbuds on the market doing live translation. There are apps that'll do it for free. You could put a bilingual second on that crew. You could teach a crew lead the forty words that actually come up on a job site, and a lot of guys pick up more than that just working alongside the crew.
None of those are perfect. Neither is waiting five months for somebody who checks every box.
One more thing worth knowing. There's a reason the law asks whether a language requirement is actually necessary for that specific job, rather than pasted across every posting. It's the same question you should be asking. If it's truly required for that role, fine. If it went on there after one bad experience and got copied onto everything since, that's worth a look for more than one reason.
No. I want you to raise them.
But an isolated bad experience doesn't earn a permanent line on your job description.
It's the same flawed logic as calling a company-wide meeting to deal with the behavior of one or two people. Everybody sits there while you address a problem that belongs to two guys, and the ones who were doing it right walk out feeling accused. It doesn't fix the two. It costs you with everybody else.
Same move here. Something went wrong once, maybe twice, and now it's primary search criteria for every hire you'll make going forward.
Don't ignore the past. Learn from it. Just don't give it more authority over the future than it earned.
The way you tell the difference is repetition. A pattern you've watched happen four or five times is information. One bad memory is a memory.
Then ask how good that memory was to begin with. A lot of these requirements came out of an exit conversation, and those are the polite version. People don't usually burn a bridge on their last day, so you get the reason that's easiest to say. Some of these lines aren't built on one bad experience. They're built on the reason he gave you for it.
And while you're holding out for the person who checks every box, that seat is empty.
Somebody's covering the route. You're running short. Your customer's on their second crew this season. Every week that seat stays open costs you more than the thing you were protecting yourself from.
You were protecting yourself against one bad hire. You're paying for it with four months of an empty truck.
Print the job description for the seat you're trying to fill right now.
Go line by line and put every requirement in one of two piles. Pile one: this came from a real failure I've watched happen more than once. Pile two: this came from one bad memory, and I can name the guy.
Then look at pile two and ask what you'd actually trade. Not for a warm body — I'd never tell you that. For a good person you'd have to teach one thing.
If pile two is longer than pile one, you didn't write a job description. You wrote a list of scars.
A lot of the people we find for our clients weren't applying anywhere. They're good, they're working, and they're not answering ads. A job description built out of old bad experiences screens those people out first — because somebody who isn't looking has no reason to sit there and make a case for himself against a list.
If you want help sorting which requirements are real and which ones are scar tissue, that's a conversation we have every week at BR1. Contact us to get started.
Until next time, keep building your stronger team!