When “Hit the Ground Running” Means the Same Job Title,
Good People Get Set Aside.

You are hiring a field operations manager for a company that installs solar panels on homes. The manager gets each home’s permit and inspection done, orders panels, and keeps installers safe on roofs. Your job description lists that work and asks for five years as a field operations manager.

Your director says to find someone who can hit the ground running. So you and your recruiter look for people who have held that title at another solar company.

For six years, one applicant was the production manager for a touring theater company. In a new city every week, she hired local stagehands, worked with each venue’s own staff, kept the crew safe high above the stage, and got the show open on time when equipment arrived late.

You are looking for field operations managers, so you set her application aside. Eight weeks later the job is still open, and your lead installer is covering it.

You did what leaders at every level are told to do when a job opens. The advice to find someone who can hit the ground running is sound, because an open job costs the team real work. Someone with years in closely related work also brings knowledge that helps.

Your job description listed the work but never said what those five years stood for. So you and your recruiter guessed from each title who could do the work. The applicant guessed which parts of her work you would count. A written list of what the five years stood for would have taken that cognitive load off all three of you.

When I hire, I write three things down before I read the first résumé. Then I can see what a person can do, whatever their last job was called. One AI company puts the same aim plainly on its careers page: it cares about what a person can do, not where they learned to do it.

For a job on your team, the three things are:

The competencies the job needs at its level, each written as work the person will do or a judgment call they will make.

One question for each competency that starts “Think of a time you ___” and is asked in four parts: what the situation was, what they needed to get done, what they did, and what happened.

One real problem the person in this job will face, the same for every candidate. You send it before the interview, and they work on it on their own time. In the interview, they walk you through what they did and why.

Asking in parts lets every candidate see what a full answer covers. In a 2021 mock interview study by Katie Maras and colleagues, autistic adults’ answers to standard questions were rated lower, on average, than non-autistic adults’ answers. When the questions were later asked in parts, with prompts for what to cover, the gap narrowed until it was no longer statistically significant.

These questions matter even more now that AI is part of hiring. A candidate can use AI to make a résumé fit your posting with little effort. A live answer to each question, in its four parts, tests what the résumé claims. AI that sorts résumés for you can also pass over qualified candidates, because it looks for the wrong thing when nobody has told it what the job needs.

A candidate may also use AI on the problem from the job. Hearing them defend their reasons in the interview is how I can usually tell whether AI helped them with the work or did the work for them. My AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix helps leaders decide where AI belongs in their work, including hiring.

For the solar job, here is what I would write down: the five competencies, one of the five questions, and the problem from the job.

This time, read her application against those five lines. Keeping her crew safe high above the stage is leading the installers, and getting each venue’s staff to work from her plan is leading people who do not report to you. The question about late equipment lets her show you how she opened shows on dates that could not move.

What she still needs is the solar part: permits, inspections, and the safety rules for roofs and electrical work. Your team teaches her those in her first weeks, while she starts on the work she already knows. So she can still hit the ground running, as your director asked.

Hiring this way is part of what I call cognitive architecture: how an organization designs the way its people think and make decisions. The same way of hiring helps neurodivergent people whose résumés show time out of work. Asked about the work, as the production manager was, they can prove skills and ways of thinking the résumé leaves out.

List every line in the job description below that asks for a job title or a number of years. For each line, write the competency it most likely stands for, as work the person in this job will do and judgment calls they will make. Mark each one as a guess for me to confirm, and say which ones are specific to this job and could be taught in the first weeks. For each competency, draft one question about a time the person did this work, in four parts: the situation, what they needed to get done, what they did and what happened. Then draft one real problem from this job that every candidate could work through on their own time before the interview, and two or three parts of their approach to ask each candidate about. Do not read, score, sort or sum up any candidate or résumé. The job description: [paste here]