The vacancy tells you what job needs filling. Your team tells you who you need.
How long does your recruitment process take?
And here’s the more expensive question:
How long does it take to discover you’ve recruited the wrong person?
Growing businesses face an uncomfortable problem.
The faster you grow, the more people you need.
The more people you need, the faster you have to recruit.
And the faster you recruit, the easier it becomes to make expensive mistakes.
So recruitment tends to begin with the obvious question:
Who do we need for this job?
I’d start somewhere else.
What’s missing from the team?
DON’T START WITH THE CANDIDATE
Most recruitment starts with a vacancy.
Someone writes a job description.
HR agrees a specification.
The advert goes out.
Applications arrive.
CVs are filtered.
Candidates are interviewed.
Eventually somebody gets hired.
Perfect Teams® approaches the problem from the opposite direction.
Before asking:
Who should we recruit?
Ask:
What do we already have?
What characters are represented in the team?
How do those people naturally communicate?
Where are the team’s strengths?
Where are its blind spots?
What capability does the role require?
And what capability will the organisation need next?
Because a candidate doesn’t join a vacancy.
They join a team.
CHARACTER ISN’T A JOB DESCRIPTION
This is an important distinction.
Perfect Teams® identifies three primary ways people tend to process information.
Green — Go
Direct. Action-orientated. Opportunity-focused.
Blue — Think
Analytical. Detailed. Logical.
Red — Feel
Relationship-focused. People-aware. Empathetic.
Everybody has access to all three, but we tend to have preferences.
Those preferences can tell us something useful about how someone is likely to approach a role, communicate, solve problems and interact with others.
But they don’t tell us whether somebody can do the job.
Character is evidence. Not a verdict.
A highly direct Green individual might make an excellent salesperson.
Or a terrible one.
An empathetic Red individual might make an excellent client-services manager.
Or a terrible one.
A detailed Blue individual might make an excellent compliance officer.
Or a terrible one.
Capability is more complicated than colour.
Recruiting well means combining evidence about character, experience, competence and capability with an understanding of the team the person will actually join.
RECRUIT THE MISSING CAPABILITY
This is where recruitment gets interesting.
Imagine you’ve got a highly entrepreneurial leadership team.
Ideas everywhere.
Opportunities everywhere.
Energy everywhere.
Green everywhere.
Do you really need another person who sees exactly what everybody else sees?
Perhaps.
But perhaps what the team desperately needs is somebody who asks:
Have we thought this through?
Or:
Who’s actually going to deliver it?
Or:
What effect will this have on our customers and people?
The vacancy may say Operations Director.
The CVs may tell you who has been an Operations Director before.
But the team map can reveal something neither tells you:
What does this team need this person to contribute?
That’s a very different recruitment question.
RECRUITMENT IS A TEAM DECISION
We worked with a growing technology company recruiting into its client services and support operation.
The roles required people who could listen, understand problems, communicate clearly, build relationships and find solutions.
Character information gave the company another lens through which to understand applicants.
Not:
Which colour should we recruit?
But:
How is this person likely to approach the work — and how will that complement the people already doing it?
That distinction matters.
Because there is no universally perfect character.
There’s only the question:
Perfect for what?
THE CV TELLS YOU WHERE THEY’VE BEEN
CVs are useful.
Experience matters.
Qualifications matter.
Interviews matter.
References matter.
But almost all conventional recruitment evidence looks backwards.
Where have you worked?
What have you done?
What qualifications have you acquired?
How many years’ experience do you have?
Useful questions.
But recruitment is a decision about the future.
You’re really trying to discover:
What will this person be capable of contributing here?
And that’s why understanding character can add another dimension.
It gives you something else to explore.
How will they communicate?
How will they respond to the characters already in the team?
Where might they contribute something different?
Where might friction occur?
How should they be developed?
You’re not replacing judgement.
You’re improving the information on which judgement is based.
FASTER ISN’T THE REAL PRIZE
The original version of this article concentrated heavily on speed.
Could profiling help eliminate unsuitable applicants earlier?
Could managers spend less time interviewing?
Could recruitment costs fall?
Potentially, yes.
And when you’re recruiting at scale, those efficiencies can matter enormously.
But I now think there’s a much more important prize.
Better decisions.
Hiring somebody quickly who leaves six months later isn’t efficient.
Filling the vacancy isn’t the objective.
Building capability is.
And the value continues after the candidate joins.
RECRUITMENT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
Imagine knowing something meaningful about a person’s character before their first day.
Now the information doesn’t disappear into an HR folder.
Their manager can use it.
How does this person prefer to receive information?
How do they learn?
What naturally motivates them?
Where might they need more explanation?
Who in the existing team might complement them?
Where might misunderstanding arise?
Suddenly recruitment connects with onboarding.
Onboarding connects with development.
Development connects with communication.
Communication connects with retention.
One piece of insight can travel through the employee’s entire journey.
That’s where profiling becomes useful.
Not because it tells you whom to hire.
Because it helps you become more capable of hiring, integrating, developing and leading them.
WHAT DOES A BAD HIRE REALLY COST?
Recruitment fees are easy to see.
The larger costs aren’t.
Management time.
Training.
Lost productivity.
Customer disruption.
Team frustration.
Conflict.
Then perhaps another resignation.
Another vacancy.
Another recruitment process.
Another three months getting somebody up to speed.
The real question isn’t:
How much does recruitment cost?
It’s:
What does getting recruitment wrong cost?
Which brings us back to the beginning.
STOP RECRUITING FOR THE VACANCY
Of course the job matters.
But the person you recruit isn’t going to work inside a job description.
They’re going to work inside a system of people.
So before you advertise the next vacancy, look around the room.
Who have you already got?
What do they bring?
Where are the strengths?
Where are the blind spots?
What will the business require as it grows?
And then ask the Perfect Teams® question:
What’s missing?
Because the objective isn’t to fill your vacancies faster.
It’s to build the capability your organisation needs next.
Recruit the person. Build the team. Develop the capability.
Personality Divides. Character Unites.
You can’t download capability.™
What capability does your team need next?
Perfect Teams® helps organisations map the character and capability already within their teams — and use that understanding to make better decisions about what they need next.
Originally published 21 September 2022. Updated August 2026.
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