Core Direction
Someone leaves after 15 or 20 years.
They knew every customer. They remembered why processes worked the way they did. They handled problems nobody formally assigned to them and kept critical information in a filing system known only to them and possibly one retired employee.
So the business does what businesses do.
It opens their old job description and starts looking for another one.
Another person with the same experience. The same industry knowledge. The same relationships. The same willingness to quietly perform three jobs for the salary of one.
In other words:
“We need another Susan.”
Maybe you don’t.
Maybe Susan was exceptional.
Or maybe the company spent years building its workflow around one person’s ability to compensate for a role that was never designed properly.
That’s not just a recruiting problem.
That’s a business problem the vacancy finally made visible.
The Vacancy Is Telling You Something
When a long-tenured employee leaves, the instinct is to restore what was lost as quickly as possible.
That makes sense. The work still needs to get done.
But speed can send the business straight into recreating the same role, the same bottlenecks, and the same dependency.
Before opening the search, ask:
- Which responsibilities still belong together?
- Which tasks exist only because the process is outdated?
- What knowledge needs to move into the organization?
- What business problem should the next person solve?
- What should this role create over the next several years?
The old job description tells you what one person was doing.
It doesn’t necessarily tell you what the company needs now.
Stop Recruiting for a Human Workaround
Some employees become irreplaceable because they’re exceptional.
Others become irreplaceable because the business never fixed the things they learned to work around.
They know which customer needs special handling.
They know who to call when the official process fails.
They know which spreadsheet contains the numbers everyone actually trusts.
They know which leader has to be asked informally before the formal approval can happen.
That knowledge is valuable.
It’s also a warning.
Hiring another person to inherit every workaround doesn’t make the company stronger. It simply transfers the dependency.
Strong recruiting should help expose those issues before the business wraps them into another job description.
Hire for the Business You’re Becoming
The next hire shouldn’t be expected to preserve every part of the role exactly as it existed.
Some responsibilities may need to be separated.
Some work may need to be automated.
Some knowledge may need to be documented.
Some expectations may belong to another department entirely.
And some tasks may exist only because everyone stopped asking why they were being done.
That doesn’t mean history has no value.
It means history shouldn’t quietly write the future job description.
The goal isn’t to find a human copy of the person who left.
It’s to define what the business needs the next person to create.
Strong Recruiting Starts Before the Search
Strong recruiting doesn’t begin with sourcing.
It begins with understanding the business problem behind the vacancy.
Why does this role exist?
What needs to improve?
What should the person own?
What outcomes should they create?
Where did the previous role become too broad, too dependent, or too vague?
Once those answers are clear, recruiting can do more than replace a name on the org chart.
It can help the company make a better decision about what it needs next.
Because “find us another Susan” may sound efficient.
It’s also how companies spend years replacing people without fixing the role.
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