The Role Nobody Wants to Fill

The Vacancy That Persists

Every organisation has at least one. The role that is critical to the organisation's functioning, that has been vacant longer than anyone is comfortable with, that has been filled and then emptied multiple times, that does not seem to attract the right people or retain the ones it does. The standard explanations cycle through: the market is competitive, the compensation is wrong, the role is too broad or too narrow, the previous person left on bad terms. These explanations are not always wrong. They frequently miss the actual source of the problem.

The Role's Operating Conditions

Some roles are structurally mismatched with the operating natures of the people most likely to fill them. The role was designed — explicitly or implicitly — for a particular kind of operating signature. Over time, that signature has become embedded in the role's requirements: the pace of decision-making it demands, the kind of thinking it requires, the communication norms it assumes, the sustaining conditions it provides or fails to provide.

When the pool of candidates available for the role does not contain many people with that signature, the role stays vacant. Or it is filled by someone whose nature is different from what the role was designed for, and that person either underperforms or leaves — generating the recurring vacancy that the organisation keeps trying to fill with better candidates rather than with better role design.

What the Recurring Vacancy Is Saying

The recurring vacancy is data. It tells the organisation something about the fit between the role's design and the operating natures of the people most likely to be attracted to it. It tells the organisation something about the conditions the role creates — and whether those conditions are sustainable for the person who inhabits it. A role that requires sustained high-output under high ambiguity, without a clear feedback loop, without social connection to the broader team, without the resources to execute the authority it nominally carries — that role will not hold many operating natures for long. Not because people are incapable, but because the conditions the role creates are not conditions under which most people can sustain coherent performance.

The Structural Source of the Problem

The most common organisational response to recurring vacancy is to broaden the search or adjust the compensation. Both are useful at the margin. The more useful response is to examine the role itself — not its job description, but its operating conditions. What does this role actually require of the person who holds it, day to day? What operating signature would find those conditions natural? How many people of that signature are likely to exist in the available talent pool? These questions often reveal that the role was designed for a very specific — sometimes very rare — operating nature, and that the organisation has been trying to fill it with people who are simply not that nature.

Redesigning the Role's Conditions

The role can often be redesigned. Not in terms of its stated responsibilities, but in terms of the conditions it creates for the person holding it. What feedback loops are missing? What social connection is absent? What resources are required to match the authority the role carries? What structural support would allow a wider range of operating natures to inhabit this role sustainably?

These are design questions, not talent questions. The organisation that asks them changes the economics of the vacancy — not by finding the rare person whose nature is specifically designed for the impossible conditions the role creates, but by redesigning those conditions so that the role can be filled by someone whose nature is available.

The Talent Market Is Not the Problem

The role nobody wants to fill is not waiting for better candidates. It is waiting for the organisation to understand that the conditions it creates are the source of the problem — and that those conditions, unlike the talent market, are within the organisation's control to change. The intelligence required to see this is the intelligence of operating nature: what the role requires at the structural level, what natures that requirement matches, and what the role's current design makes possible or impossible for the people who enter it.

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