Barriers to a Great Hiring Cipher: The Specificity Problem

Most hiring mistakes don’t happen in the interview room. They happened weeks earlier, when someone sat down to define the role and decided that “strong leadership skills” and “drives results” were specific enough to find the right candidate. 

Unfortunately, these qualities don’t give you a framework to rate candidates against. Rather, you end up with something more akin to a horoscope — vague enough to fit almost anyone, and useful to almost no one.

The Cipher® hiring framework is built around one idea: define exactly what success looks like in a role before you ever sit down with a candidate.  

The Cipher components follow a simple acronym, “CODE:”

Charge: the one-sentence impact this person must have on the company. What will be different because they were hired?

Outcome: the tangible result that will prove the hire worked. What will the organization be able to point to as evidence of success?

Deliverables: the five to seven accountabilities most critical to achieving that Outcome.

Efforts: the specific actions, decisions, and behaviors required to complete those Deliverables. 

A Cipher works best when it’s specific. Think of a Cipher as the destination at the end of your journey – if you can’t tell me where that journey ends, how will you ever know that you’ve arrived? 

What “lack of specificity” looks like

It tends to arrive in one of three forms:

1. The uncertain Cipher. Sometimes vagueness isn’t a failure of synthesis — it’s a failure of self-knowledge. The organization’s managers haven’t done the hard internal work of deciding what they actually need. The role is being created to solve a problem no one has fully articulated, or the scope is still being negotiated, or leadership has conflicting mental models of what success looks like. You can’t write a precise Cipher for a role you haven’t finished defining.

2. The watered-down Cipher. You gather input from multiple stakeholders — which is the right instinct — but instead of synthesizing their perspectives into a sharp picture and making trade-offs about what suggestions you will and won’t accept, you try to accommodate everyone. The deliverables get softened. The language rounds off. What started as “reduce customer churn by 15 percent in the first 18 months” becomes “focus on customer retention.” You’ve gone from a specific, measurable outcome to a generality. Generalities don’t help you hire or evaluate 

3. The under-informed Cipher. The hiring manager writes the Cipher alone, or with minimal input, because getting the right people in the room feels like too much process. The result is a document that reflects one person’s perspective — and often misses the expectations that peers, direct reports, or internal customers have of the role. You’ve built a test without asking everyone what they need the candidate to pass.

The fix: Build the Cipher with a team

The antidote to all three forms of vagueness is the same: don’t develop your Cipher in isolation. Assemble what we call a Hiring Board of Advisors — a small, deliberate group whose job is to pressure-test your thinking before it hardens into a document.

That group should include:

-You (the hiring manager) — you own the role and the relationship

-Your boss — they see the broader strategic context you may not 

-An HR partner — they bring institutional knowledge and cross-functional perspective

-Peers and internal customers of the role — the people this hire will serve or collaborate with most closely

-Direct reports or the role’s future peers — the people who will work alongside this person every day

-Occasionally, external stakeholders — clients, board members, or advisors who interact with the role from the outside 

Here’s the key: develop your own thoughts first, but when you convene this group, get their unbiased input before you show them your draft. Ask open questions:

-What does success look like in this role in 24 months? 

-What activity should be this role’s highest priority to achieve success?

-What is the state of this role/the organization it will oversee? How does it need to change?

-What are you most unhappy about with the incumbent in the role? What aren’t they doing? What are they doing incorrectly?

-What would failure look like? 

-What does this team most need right now that it doesn’t have?

Let them answer without the anchor of your existing language. Then share the draft and let them react. This sequence matters. Showing the draft first doesn’t yield insight — it yields edits. You want thinking, not revision.

Once you’ve gathered and integrated their input, finalize the Cipher’s Deliverables — the specific outcomes the role must achieve. Aim for no more than seven. This is a constraint with a purpose: if everything is essential, nothing is. The discipline of choosing your top seven forces a prioritization conversation that vague Ciphers never have. It also creates a more useful interview guide, because each deliverable becomes an area you can specifically probe.

The standard to hold yourself to

Before you lock in any Cipher, apply one test to every Deliverable: Could we interview for this? If you can’t ask an interview question that would produce real evidence for or against it — if the language is so general that any answer would qualify — it isn’t specific enough.

“Drive operational efficiency” fails the test. “Standardize staffing protocols to reduce field labor cost” passes it.

Specificity in your Cipher is what makes it useful and separates it from being the horoscope mentioned earlier. Hold every element of the Cipher to standard of being specific enough to interview against and it will provide you with the specific candidate you need.