Position Filled. Job Description Pending.

There are industries where recruitment is relatively straightforward.

If you are opening a bank, you hire bankers. If you are setting up a textile mill, you look for people who understand textiles. If you are opening a retail showroom, you search for people who can sell, manage inventory, deal with customers and, preferably, maintain their composure when somebody asks for a 40-percent discount after occupying the salesman for two hours.

But what happens when you are building a business for which practically nobody has prior experience?

Who exactly do you recruit? And, perhaps more importantly, what exactly do you ask them during the interview?

I encountered this problem rather early in my career, during the first quarter of 1992.

India was beginning to liberalise several sectors of its economy, and telecommunications was entering an exciting new phase. Technologies and services that would later become commonplace were still unfamiliar territory. The company I joined was one of the front-runners in what was then broadly described as the “messaging” business.

Today the word messaging sounds almost ridiculously ordinary. We send hundreds of messages every week without considering it an industry. In 1992, however, messaging had the aura of tomorrow about it. Electronic communication itself carried a mild science-fiction flavour.

There were products, technologies, concepts, opportunities and acronyms that were emerging faster than people could become experts in them.

This created an interesting problem for Human Resources. How do you recruit experienced professionals for an industry that has no experienced professionals?

The obvious solution was to recruit intelligent people from neighbouring industries and hope that intelligence, adaptability and confidence would compensate for the missing experience.

Confidence, fortunately, was available in abundant supply.

My Interview With the Future

At the time, I was working in the Indian IT industry.

The phrase “IT industry” itself meant something rather different then. For a large part of corporate India, information technology was still largely associated with hardware—computers, peripherals, systems, terminals and various impressive-looking machines that occupied expensive office space and generated an equally impressive vocabulary.

The Indian software industry had not yet exploded into the global phenomenon it would later become.

I was interviewed directly by the Head of Sales for the position of Regional Head, responsible for virtually the entire range of messaging products—existing as well as future.

That last category was particularly fascinating.

I was apparently expected to manage products that had not yet properly arrived.

It was perhaps my first formal appointment with the future.

The interview itself remains memorable because both of us were performing an interesting intellectual balancing act.

We were discussing a new industry with the solemn confidence of two men who appeared to know considerably more about it than either of us probably did.

This is one of management’s lesser-known skills.

It may be called Professional Certainty Under Conditions of Collective Uncertainty.

The questions were perfectly sensible. What were my current skills? What areas did I believe I needed to improve? How did I see the market developing? What were my expectations? What were my future plans? How would I build a region? How would I develop customers?

These were excellent questions.

The only minor inconvenience was that the industry around which some of those questions revolved was still being invented.

Eventually, I was given an opportunity to ask my own questions. Some related to technology, products, market structure and commercial possibilities.

The answers were equally impressive. They were also occasionally tangential.

I suspect neither side considered this unusual.

The interviewer was evaluating whether I could succeed in a business whose final shape was uncertain. I was evaluating whether I wanted to join an organisation whose future shape was equally uncertain.

In retrospect, it was less an interview and more a mutual declaration of optimism.

Hiring Without a Precedent

This is where Human Resources faced a challenge far more complicated than ordinary recruitment.

Recruitment normally depends heavily on precedents.

A company knows what a successful Sales Manager looks like because it already has Sales Managers. It understands what competencies a Plant Manager requires because similar positions exist elsewhere. Job descriptions evolve from years of organisational experience.

A new-domain company has none of these luxuries. There is no historical employee profile. There is no established competency map. There may not even be a fully established business model.

You are hiring people for jobs that may themselves change after six months.

The traditional recruitment question— “Have you done this before?”

—becomes slightly embarrassing when the truthful answer across the entire industry is: “No.”

This forces organisations to recruit differently.

They begin hiring for transferable capability rather than exact experience.

Can this person learn quickly? Can this person sell an unfamiliar concept? Can the individual function without detailed instructions? Can the manager operate in ambiguity? Can someone who has successfully sold computers sell communication services? Can somebody from banking understand a technology-led market? Can an engineer develop commercial instincts? Can a salesperson survive without a forty-page product brochure explaining what exactly he is selling?

Suddenly, adaptability becomes more valuable than pedigree.

First Build the Layers

The company adopted an interesting organisational strategy.

HR began building layers.

Senior positions were recruited. Regional positions were filled. Functional roles were created. Managers were appointed. Executives were recruited beneath them.

The organisation gradually began acquiring the reassuring appearance of a proper company.

Boxes appeared on organisation charts. Lines connected boxes.

Titles became increasingly impressive. Head. Regional Head. Manager. Executive. Coordinator.

Somewhere between the boxes and the connecting lines, a business was expected to emerge.

The philosophy appeared to be simple:

First acquire enough capable people. Then, as experience develops, rearrange them into the organisation that the business actually requires.

At first glance, this may sound disorderly. In reality, it can be an extremely rational startup strategy.

When a business model itself is evolving, designing a permanent organisation too early can be dangerous. You may confidently build five departments only to discover that you actually need three. You may appoint a senior manager for one product line only to find that another product becomes the real growth engine. You may create geographic territories that make perfect sense on a conference-room map but make absolutely no commercial sense once customers start buying.

In such situations, organisational flexibility becomes more important than organisational perfection.

HR was essentially creating a reservoir of managerial capability.

As the market taught the company what it actually needed, people could be repositioned.

Of course, this sounds considerably more elegant in management language than it sometimes feels to employees.

To management, it is called: “Dynamic organisational realignment.”

To employees, it may sound more like: “Yesterday you were Regional Manager North. From Monday, please discover your passion for Strategic Accounts.”

The Employee Expectation Problem

This brings us to one of the biggest challenges of layered hiring: expectations.

People do not join companies as movable boxes on PowerPoint slides.

They join with ambitions.

A designation quickly becomes part of identity. Give someone the title “Regional Head” and within approximately seventy-two hours, the person begins emotionally acquiring the region. The chair belongs to him. The territory belongs to him. The team belongs to him. Sometimes, apparently, the stationery cupboard also belongs to him.

Then the organisation changes.

Suddenly, territories merge. Functions shift. Reporting structures move. Products change. A person recruited to lead a team may discover that the team is smaller than originally imagined. Another person may unexpectedly inherit a much larger responsibility.

This is where management must handle expectations carefully.

In emerging industries, job descriptions should ideally come with an invisible footnote: “Actual role may differ materially from brochure.”

The psychological contract between employee and employer becomes as important as the employment contract. People need to understand that they are joining an evolving business rather than occupying a permanently defined chair.

The difference is enormous.

Managerial Awkwardness

There was also an amusing managerial problem.

When almost everyone is new to the industry, hierarchy does not always correspond neatly with knowledge.

A senior manager may possess twenty years of management experience but only six weeks of industry experience. A young engineer may know the technology far better. A salesperson may understand customer behaviour better than the product specialist. The product specialist may understand the technology but have absolutely no idea why customers refuse to buy it.

This produces what I would call Management Awkwardness.

The boss must lead while learning. The subordinate must sometimes teach while appearing to be learning.

Everyone must occasionally pretend that the meeting is proceeding exactly as expected.

It is a wonderful environment for humility—provided humility has been included in the recruitment specification.

Unfortunately, managerial ego has never required domain experience. It arrives fully trained.

Competition Accelerates Everything

The moment competitors enter, the entire organisation begins to learn faster.

Competition is one of business’s most efficient educational institutions.

A competitor launches a product. Suddenly your product roadmap accelerates.

A rival hires an aggressive sales team. Your own sales structure is immediately reviewed.

A competitor announces a new pricing model. Within hours, managers who had previously described pricing as “strategic and carefully considered” begin asking whether prices can be changed by Monday morning.

Competition creates urgency. It also exposes weaknesses in early organisational design.

Suddenly the employee who had been recruited because “we may need him later” becomes extremely important.

That is one advantage of layered hiring in a new industry. You create organisational capacity before the precise demand becomes visible.

The risk, of course, is overstaffing.

There is always a temptation in rapidly growing companies to confuse employee count with organisational strength.

They are not the same thing.

A restaurant with twenty waiters is not necessarily better managed than one with ten.

A retail store can have twelve salespeople and still make the customer feel completely unattended—usually because eleven are discussing yesterday’s cricket match while the twelfth is searching for the billing clerk.

The Retail Parallel

I see versions of the same phenomenon even in retail.

Suppose a retailer decides to enter a completely new category.

Perhaps a traditional fabric store begins selling ready-made clothing, launching online consultations or entering corporate uniforms.

The first instinct is often to design precise job descriptions. But there may be no historical basis for precision. The person recruited for “online sales” may eventually become more useful handling customer relationships. The person appointed for institutional sales may discover opportunities in wedding groups.

A salesman from fabrics may turn out to understand custom tailoring better than somebody recruited specifically for that purpose.

Businesses often discover people’s real strengths only after the organisation begins operating. The challenge is allowing that discovery without creating chaos.

What Those Early Years Taught Me

Looking back, that period taught me something important about organisations.

We often imagine companies as carefully engineered structures. Management books encourage this belief.

There are organisation charts, reporting relationships, competency frameworks, job descriptions, performance matrices and wonderfully symmetrical diagrams.

Reality is less disciplined.

Particularly in new industries, organisations often evolve through experimentation. People are hired. Roles are tested. Structures are rearranged. Managers succeed unexpectedly. Others fail unexpectedly.

Products rise. Products disappear. Departments expand. Departments merge.

And gradually, through a mixture of strategy, accident, ambition, competition and caffeine, something resembling a functioning organisation emerges.

The great mistake is believing that uncertainty represents managerial failure.

Sometimes uncertainty simply means you have entered a market before the instruction manual has been written. The real management skill is not eliminating uncertainty. It is building an organisation capable of functioning intelligently inside it.

That requires employees who can learn beyond their job descriptions, managers who can admit that they do not possess all the answers, and HR teams willing to recruit for potential rather than merely matching CV keywords.

In 1992, none of us could have known exactly where telecommunications, messaging or information technology would eventually go.

We were stepping into a business whose destination was still being negotiated with technology itself. Perhaps that was precisely what made it exciting. We were not simply filling positions in an organisation. We were filling positions in an organogram that was still trying to decide what it wanted to become.

And strangely enough, that may be one of the most accurate descriptions of management in any rapidly changing business.

First you hire the people. Then you discover the business. Then you redraw the organisation chart. And finally, management presents the entire journey at the annual conference as if everything had happened according to plan.