Stop Hiring a Job Title. Hire the Skills Your Business Is Missing.

Hiring by job title means buying a bundle of tasks someone else decided belong together, when most businesses actually have three or four specific skill gaps. At GM For Hire, I start with the gaps, not the title, because I think that is the only way a founder-led business ends up with the right leadership at the right level.

I see this a lot with founders who have outgrown the business they built. They decide they need a senior hire, so they write a job ad for a COO or a GM, run a search for a few months and then wonder why it is still so hard to turn a profit. The way I see it, the person is rarely the problem. The role was built around a title when it should have been built around a need.

Before you ask which senior title to hire, ask which skills your business is missing and how many days a week you really need each one. Rachel Tigel, GM For Hire

What is the problem with hiring by job title?

Your business doesn't read a job description. It might need strong commercial judgement two days a week, financial discipline one day a week and someone who properly owns the customer. A single full-time title makes you buy all of that at once, whether you need it or not.

I think that is why so many senior hires end up with two days of really valuable work and three days of whatever fills the calendar. You end up paying for someone to be there rather than for what they produce.

How does GM For Hire approach it differently?

I don't start with a role. I start with a Commercial Audit, which is a fixed-scope review of the whole business that takes around two weeks. It covers customer experience, email and data, team and structure, logistics and cost, inventory and product, P&L and financial, and tech stack and agencies.

That is how we find out what the business is really missing. Most founders are surprised, because the gaps are almost never one role. They are usually three or four specific capabilities, and each one is needed at a different level.

What does that look like in practice?

Once the audit is done, the way I work with a founder usually runs like this:

Why measure output, not hours?

Hours at a desk don't tell you anything about profit. I have seen full-time hires be flat out every day while the business stayed stuck. When I work with a founder, the engagement is scoped around results, so you know what will be fixed, who owns it and what should have moved in the first 90 days.

Try this one yourself this week. Write down what each of your most senior people produced last month, rather than how long they were available. I think the gap between those two answers is where a lot of your margin is hiding.

What about the cost?

I would look at the total commitment against what you get out of it, rather than comparing a day rate to a salary. A permanent executive comes with onboarding time, a notice period and a fixed line in your P&L that is hard to undo if the role turns out to be wrong. Working with me scales with the scope of what the business needs, so the right shape is best worked out on a discovery call.

If you want to go deeper on the economics, I have written about it in The Cost and Benefit of Fractional Hiring in a Scaling Business.

Who is this right for?

Founder-led retail, eCommerce and beauty brands where revenue is real, but profit, time or clarity isn't keeping up. If you are the bottleneck on most decisions, or you have tried fixes that didn't stick, I think a conversation is worth having before you write a job ad.

The takeaway

I would stop asking which senior title to hire. Work out the skills you are missing, rank them by how much they affect profit, and fill each one at the level the business really needs. If that has struck a nerve, book a discovery call and we can work out what that looks like for your business.

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