“We need someone strategic, but also happy to be hands-on.”
It is a phrase we hear regularly, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Plenty of excellent people can think strategically while remaining close to delivery.
The difficulty comes when “hands-on” gradually expands to mean running paid media, producing content, designing campaign materials, managing the CRM, reporting to the board, leading a team and updating the website.
At that point, the business is not looking for someone with a broad skill set. It is trying to combine several different jobs into one vacancy.
We are seeing more of these compressed roles across marketing, creative, digital, product and commercial recruitment. Businesses are trying to keep teams lean, headcount is being examined closely, and every appointment is expected to make a visible difference.
Those pressures are real. However, trying to solve several resource problems with one person often makes recruitment slower, rather than more efficient.
How a role becomes compressed
Very few hiring managers deliberately create an impossible job.
It usually happens gradually.
The person leaving may have accumulated responsibilities over several years. As the business changed, they picked up new projects and tasks without anything being removed from their original role.
When they leave, their current workload becomes the replacement job description. Nobody stops to ask whether all of those responsibilities should continue to sit together.
Compressed roles can also emerge when several stakeholders contribute to the brief. Marketing adds its priorities, sales includes what it needs, the leadership team adds strategic responsibilities, and HR includes wider organisational expectations.
Every request may make sense individually. Together, they can create a role that no single person could realistically deliver.
Budget is another common factor. The business may genuinely need support across several areas but only have approval for one permanent hire. The temptation is to include every gap within that vacancy and hope to find someone unusually versatile.
That is understandable, but it rarely removes the underlying resource problem.
Breadth is valuable. Lack of focus is not.
There are brilliant generalists who can work effectively across several disciplines.
A strong Marketing Manager might understand content, CRM, events, performance marketing and brand. A Senior Designer may have experience across digital, print and campaign work.
The problem is not asking somebody to bring breadth.
It is expecting them to deliver every discipline to a specialist level, with no support and no clear priorities.
A broad role can work well when the person understands what matters most, has realistic objectives and knows where external or internal support is available.
It becomes difficult when everything is described as essential and every responsibility is treated as equally urgent.
Signs that your vacancy may be trying to do too much
One of the clearest warning signs is a mismatch between the title and the level of responsibility.
A Marketing Executive should not be expected to create company-wide strategy, advise the board and own a large commercial budget. Equally, a Midweight Designer should not automatically be responsible for brand strategy, UX research, motion design and creative leadership.
Salary can create a similar disconnect. When a role combines several specialist areas, candidates will judge it against the most demanding responsibilities. If the salary has been benchmarked against the least senior part of the role, it is likely to feel misaligned.
Another warning sign is a long list of essential skills.
A genuine essential requirement should be something without which the person is unlikely to succeed. When almost every skill and platform is treated as a must-have, the realistic candidate pool becomes extremely small.
It is also worth listening to how different stakeholders describe the vacancy. If one interviewer believes the main focus is strategy, another talks almost entirely about delivery and a third sees it as a team leadership role, candidates will quickly notice the lack of alignment.
The most telling question is often the simplest: what are the three most important things this person needs to achieve during their first year?
When nobody can agree on the answer, the job description probably needs more work.
Adaptability does not mean doing everything
Adaptable people are extremely valuable. They are comfortable with change, willing to learn and able to contribute beyond a narrow job description.
That should not be confused with expecting one person to operate as an entire department.
A Head of Marketing may have enough knowledge of creative, content, CRM and paid media to lead those areas effectively. Their value may come from setting direction, making good decisions and ensuring the activity supports the wider business.
That does not necessarily mean they should personally design every asset, write every campaign and manage every advertising platform.
There is an important difference between understanding an area well enough to own it and having enough time to execute every part of it.
What happens when the brief is unrealistic?
The immediate effect is usually a difficult recruitment process.
Applications arrive, but few people appear to meet the whole brief. The business may conclude that candidate quality is low, when in reality most applicants are suitable for one part of the role rather than all of it.
Experienced candidates may decide not to apply at all. They can often recognise when a business has combined several gaps into a single vacancy, particularly when the salary or support does not reflect the scope.
The search then becomes longer as the hiring team waits for the elusive person who meets every requirement. If someone is eventually appointed, they may struggle because there is no realistic way to prioritise the workload.
Even a highly capable employee can underperform when every task is urgent, and success has never been clearly defined.
That often leads to frustration on both sides and, in the worst cases, another recruitment process within a year.
How to create a more realistic role
The answer is not necessarily to remove every broad responsibility. It is to create a clearer hierarchy.
Start with the outcomes
Instead of beginning with every task the person might complete, define the most important results they need to achieve.
For a Marketing Manager, those outcomes might be:
- Build and implement a clear marketing plan
- Improve the quality and consistency of lead generation
- Develop a stronger internal marketing capability
Those priorities provide direction. The job description can still include wider responsibilities, but they no longer all carry the same weight.
Separate ownership from delivery
The person leading an area does not always need to complete every task themselves.
A Marketing Manager may own campaign performance while a freelance specialist manages paid advertising. A Creative Director may take responsibility for brand quality while Designers deliver the assets.
This allows the permanent hire to provide consistency and direction without creating an impossible workload.
Decide what is needed now
It can help to divide the required skills into three groups:
- Skills the person genuinely needs from day one
- Skills that can be developed after joining
- Skills that can be accessed elsewhere when needed
The third group might involve another team member, an agency, a freelancer or a contractor.
This exercise often reduces a long list of essential requirements to a much more realistic core.
Revisit the title and salary
The title and salary should reflect the actual level of responsibility, not simply the label used by the previous employee.
Consider the person’s decision-making authority, commercial impact, leadership responsibilities and technical depth.
Where the scope has grown significantly, the original salary benchmark may no longer be relevant.
A blended approach can solve the real problem
Some businesses do not need several new permanent employees. They need one person to own the area and access to specialist skills at the right moments.
For example, a permanent Marketing Manager could lead the strategy and manage internal relationships, while a freelance Designer supports campaign activity and a CRM contractor delivers a six-month implementation.
The business gains long-term ownership without expecting one person to become a content writer, designer, analyst, developer and performance marketer all at once.
This can be more realistic for the employee and more cost-effective for the organisation.
Look at the brief before blaming the market
There are specialist skills that remain genuinely difficult to find. A higher number of available candidates does not mean every experience level or discipline is suddenly easy to recruit.
However, when a vacancy repeatedly fails to attract the right people, the answer is not always to advertise it more widely.
Before searching harder, take a step back and ask whether one person could realistically deliver everything listed within the available time, support and salary.
The aim is not to make the role less ambitious. It is to make that ambition achievable.
A clear and focused brief will attract stronger candidates, create more useful interviews and give the eventual hire a much better chance of succeeding.
