Stop Hiring Wrong: The Pain-First Job Design Method

The Unfair Hiring Advantage Nobody Talks About

Most entrepreneurs treat hiring like a resume lottery.

• Post a generic job description

• Collect 200 applications

• Then pray someone good emerges from the pile

After hiring hundreds of amazing people over the last decade, I have learned one important lesson: The secret to hiring right has nothing to do with writing better job descriptions. The secret is understanding that your pain is someone else's passion project.

The Builder's Curse

Entrepreneurs are builders, not editors.

Our default mode is saying yes, adding more, expanding scope. We have a hard-wired belief that success creates more opportunities than capacity, which means we're always adding to our plate, never subtracting.

This creates what I call the Pain Accumulation Cycle:

1. Sales follow-up sitting in your CRM for weeks

2. Financial reports you keep meaning to analyze

3. Customer complaints you're too busy to address

4. Growth opportunities requiring skills you don't have

Most founders fall into the Lazy Hiring Trap:
"I need to hire someone" → too busy to actually work on hiring → procrastinate for months → copy-paste generic role template → hope the right person magically appears.

Reality check: You're solving the wrong problem, mainly because nobody every taught us the right way to solve this capacity constraint. The issue isn't writing a better job description, it's understanding what problems you actually need solved.

The best part is that it’s actually much easier to solve the problem if you know exactly what to do.

The Pain-First Secret

When my partner Leila Hormozi needed her first executive assistant, she didn't write a corporate job description.

She wrote a raw Facebook post:
"Busy business owner, tired of working 17-hour days with no clear inbox. I work with my husband. We started a business that's grown faster than I hoped, but I don't have time to wash my hair, let alone order food. I need someone to organize my life."

It generated the perfect candidate: Yasmin.

Eight years later, she's still there.

Growing and crushing everyday.

The big lesson here: Stop thinking about roles. Start thinking about problems.

The secret key is this: The right person gets excited about solving your specific problems, not filling a generic position.

Step 1: Pain Inventory (The Brain Dump)

Set a 20-minute timer. Write every single thing causing you stress, frustration, or missed opportunities.

Four categories:

1. Operational pain: What's broken or inefficient?

2. Capacity pain: What can't you get to?

3. Skill pain: What do you suck at?

4. Growth pain: What opportunities are you missing?

Step 2: Problem-Solution Matching

Transform each pain point into specific challenges someone could solve.

Examples:
• Pain: "I spend 3 hours weekly reconciling expenses"
• Challenge: "Help us build a system where financial tracking happens automatically"

• Pain: "Leads sit in CRM for days before follow-up"
• Challenge: "Own our lead response and turn inquiries into conversations within 2 hours"

• Pain: "I have no idea which marketing channels actually work"
• Challenge: "Build attribution systems that show us exactly where our best customers come from"

Step 3: Find the Problem-Solvers

The secret sauce: Look for people who get energized by these specific challenges, not people who check boxes on a resume.

Ask yourself: "What type of person wakes up excited to solve this exact problem?"

You are hiring the “identity” not just the “capability.”

Step 4: Culture Integration

After all of this, add your non-negotiable cultural elements:

• How do they communicate?

• What's their decision-making style?

• How do they handle feedback and conflict?

Real Examples: The Secret in Action

The "Marketing Manager" Transformation

Traditional Approach:
"Seeking Marketing Manager with 3-5 years experience in digital marketing, social media, and campaign management."

Pain-First Secret:
"Our CEO spends 15 hours weekly creating content that gets buried in the algorithm. Our best sales conversations happen on calls, but we have no system to turn those insights into scalable content. We need someone who gets excited about extracting gold from our founder's brain and turning it into systematic content that actually drives leads."

So what’s the the difference?
The first attracts resume submitters.
The second attracts problem-solvers.

It may sound basic to you, but it is insanely powerful.

Do not underestimate the uncanny power of speaking directly to the perfect candidate through the job description that you crafted with love and care.

Why This Secret Works: The Attraction Principle

At Acquisition.com, when we hired our general counsel, we had 1,000 applications. Not because we posted on every job board, but because we were crystal clear about the specific legal challenges we needed solved.

The attraction principle:
When you articulate your problems clearly, the right people recognize their solutions. Generic role descriptions signal you don't really know what you want. Specific problem statements signal you're a serious company with real challenges to tackle.

We are talking about serious people, hiring serious people, to do serious things. The least we can do is to take this process seriously.

The Problem-Solver's Perspective

Someone reading your pain-first approach thinks:
"This sounds like exactly what I want to solve."

Instead of:
"I guess I could do this job."

I have found this happen time and time again because the magic is creating that moment of recognition where someone thinks, "Finally, a company that gets it."

Even better when they say to themselves:
”They are speaking to me!”

The 60-Minute Problem-Solution Sprint

Breakdown:

• 20 minutes: Pain inventory brain dump

• 20 minutes: Convert top 5 pains into exciting challenges

• 10 minutes: Identify what type of person gets energized by each challenge

• 10 minutes: Add cultural requirements

Testing Your Approach

Read your problem statements to someone outside your industry:

• Do they understand what needs to be solved?

• Can they picture someone getting excited about these challenges?

• Would someone say "this sounds like exactly what I want to work on"?

Red Flags You're Still Thinking Wrong

I feel like a noob writing these, but I really wish someone had taught me the “beyond the obvious” approach to this process.

If you can switch your thinking and your filtering, it will help you instantly.

These were my amateur mistakes:

• Focusing on years of experience instead of problem-solving ability

• Using industry jargon instead of clear problem statements

• Listing responsibilities without context of why they matter

Honestly, If they could apply to 50 other companies in your industry, then you have probably missed the mark.

Implementation Reality

Here's what happens when you get this secret right: Instead of filtering through hundreds of generic applications, you attract people who are genuinely excited about your specific challenges.

During our recent hiring process, a candidate said, "The way you described these problems was exactly what I've been looking for." When you know your problems that clearly, and you communicate them that specifically, you're not just hiring… you're kinda matchmaking.

Sounds a little foo-foo, I know. But if Disney can sprinkle a little magic, so can you.

The bigger principle: This applies beyond hiring. Clarity of problems leads to clarity of solutions in every business decision. And the best part is, you already know all the problems so you are more than half-way there.

Your biggest frustrations are someone else's favorite puzzles to solve.

The secret is helping them find you by being honest about what's actually broken, not what sounds impressive on paper.

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💡 Simple Idea: Feed this entire post into Ai and have it build a hiring plan for you. Ask it to interview you and use this as a playbook to hire your next unicorn.

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If you are a business owner or a team leader, you should watch this episode that I did with my partner Leila Hormozi