The Job Nobody Could Hire For
Friday 9 October — Art of Leadership (II) · HR
The table
The case
Subtitle: A fictional leadership case for discussion. Source: The owner's own case (Dražen Kapusta, 2026-09-13), verbatim — the eight questions are his
The eighth candidate withdrew on a Thursday.
The founder read the recruiter’s message twice.
“She likes the company and the team. Her concern is the scope of the role.”
The position had been open for four months.
They wanted someone commercially strong, comfortable with data, capable of managing projects and confident with customers. The person would coordinate across departments, improve reporting, introduce AI into everyday work and help the founder turn ideas into execution.
Industry experience was important. So were initiative, sound judgement and the ability to work independently.
The founder had called the role Business Growth Manager.
The recruiter had begun calling it difficult.
The operations director had a different description.
“It sounds like we are trying to hire the person who will compensate for everything we have not organised.”
The Person Who Already Did Half of It
Much of the work currently landed with an experienced employee named Elena.
She knew the customers, understood how orders moved through the company and could usually find the person needed to solve a problem.
When a sales commitment became difficult to deliver, people called her. When a report contained contradictory numbers, they asked her which version was right. When the founder wanted something moved forward, he copied her into the email.
Elena was respected and increasingly tired.
She had also begun using AI to prepare customer updates, summarise discussions and organise information before handing work to colleagues.
The founder saw her as essential in her current position.
He had never asked whether she wanted part of the new one.
When the people director raised the possibility, his first response was immediate.
“We cannot afford to move her.”
The people director looked at the vacancy description.
“We are already relying on her to do a lot of this. We just haven’t given her the time or authority.”
Following the Work
They spent the next week examining the activities listed under the vacancy.
Some required commercial judgement. Others involved chasing information, translating between systems or reminding colleagues to do something already agreed.
Several recurring reports had no clear reader.
One coordination task existed because two departments used different definitions of a confirmed order.
The proposed role also included decisions the founder had never delegated. A new hire would be expected to “drive execution” while waiting for his approval.
As the team mapped the work, the single job began separating into different needs.
There was a need for better commercial analysis.
There was a need for someone to own the journey between a customer promise and delivery.
There were administrative tasks that could be simplified or supported by AI.
There were management decisions the existing leadership team needed to make.
The founder still believed they needed additional talent. He was becoming less certain that the advertised role described it.
A Small Experiment
Elena agreed to test a different way of handling one recurring customer process.
The team protected part of her week and assigned a colleague to take over specific duties. She would coordinate the trial with sales and operations.
AI helped assemble information from approved sources and draft status updates. Elena checked exceptions, clarified decisions and contacted customers when the situation required judgement.
The first few days were encouraging.
Then an update included a delivery date that had changed in a source system. The draft looked complete, but the information was stale.
The team corrected the process and made confirmation of the date an explicit step.
Another problem was harder. Elena could identify which department needed to act, but she could not require it to change priorities.
She raised this with the founder.
“If I am responsible for moving this forward, we need to agree what I can decide and what happens when teams disagree.”
The experiment had revealed both the potential of the role and the authority it required.
The Alumni Who Recognised the Job Description
At a COTRUGLI working session, the founder shared an anonymised version of the vacancy.
Several alumni laughed in recognition.
One had advertised a similar role and hired an impressive candidate who left within a year. Another had promoted a strong internal employee, then overwhelmed her by leaving all her previous responsibilities in place.
A third described how his company had separated specialist expertise from coordination and redesigned the work around a small team.
The conversation continued over dinner.
The founder admitted that he often sent promising ideas directly to employees without deciding what should stop.
A classmate asked him how a new Business Growth Manager would handle that.
He smiled.
“Probably by working late.”
The others knew the pattern. They had seen his energy during their MBA projects and benefited from it. They could also tell him when that energy created unfinished work for everyone else.
By the end of the evening, he had a more useful question than where to find the perfect candidate.
What organisation would allow a capable person to succeed in this job?
A Role Someone Could Grow Into
The people director prepared three options.
They could continue recruiting, with a narrower remit and clearer decision rights.
They could develop Elena into a new role, fund support for her existing work and bring in specialist help where needed.
Or they could create a small cross-functional team with shared tools and a named leader, rather than concentrate the whole remit in one position.
Elena was interested in progressing. She did not want an honorary promotion that added responsibility without support.
The founder wanted results quickly. He also knew that losing her through inaction would be costly.
Before approving another search, he asked the leadership team to rewrite the role around outcomes, realistic responsibilities and the resources available.
This time, they would also write down what the person would not be expected to carry.
The CDayZ Leadership Challenge
You are the founder and leadership team.
Decide how to meet the underlying business need: recruit externally, develop an internal employee, redesign the work across a team or combine those approaches.
Your decision must explain where AI helps, what remains a human responsibility and how the chosen person or team will receive enough time, authority and support to succeed.
Discussion Questions
The owner's "Eight Questions for the Room":
- What business need is hidden inside the vacancy?
- How would you divide the work?
- What makes Elena a credible candidate for a different role?
- What must come off her desk before new responsibilities are added?
- What authority should the new role carry?
- What would justify hiring externally?
- How could the COTRUGLI tribe support this transition?
- How would you assess the redesign after ninety days?
Which outcomes matter most, and which listed responsibilities are symptoms of unresolved organisational problems?
Identify tasks to remove, simplify, support with AI or assign to people with specific expertise.
What evidence of capability would you seek, and what development would she need?
How would you fund and manage that transition without shifting the same overload to another employee?
Which decisions could it make, and how would disagreements across departments be resolved?
Which capabilities are genuinely missing, and how would you design a realistic role that a strong candidate would want to accept?
Consider peer mentoring, practical projects, introductions and exposure to people already doing comparable work.
Include business outcomes, service quality, employee workload and whether the founder has changed the habits that contributed to the original problem.
A Lesson for the Next COTRUGLI Generation
A difficult vacancy can reveal a need to rethink the work itself.
AI expands the range of tasks people can handle, while making role design, judgement and coordination more consequential. Leaders must decide how those capabilities fit together and create conditions in which people can grow.
Sometimes the next step begins with recognising someone already inside the company.
The founder had spent four months asking who could do the job.
He was finally ready to ask whether he had designed a job someone could succeed in.
Your comment on this chapter
A question for the table, a disagreement, what you would have done. The case lead reads every comment; the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room, with your name.