Stance
A phase that has no name
On the word I gave the invisible phase, and why it needed one.
A mid-sized company is looking for a division head.
Twelve weeks. Three search firms. Forty profiles.
In the end an offer that walks out again after eighteen months.
Afterwards everyone sits in the same room asking the same thing. Was it the search? Was the network too small, the outreach too slow, the market too empty? They hire a new consultant and start over, from the same starting point.
It was not the search.
It was that no one built the role before searching for it. The briefing took ninety minutes, squeezed between door and calendar. No one asked what this position must have delivered in two years. On which single bottleneck it tips over. Which three things are non-negotiable and which ten are just a wish list. They posted a job; they did not design a role.
I have seen this pattern more than two hundred times. In executive boards, in management teams, with founders. Always the same order: search first, then notice you did not know what you were looking for. The search gets the blame because it is visible. The real gap sits before it, and it is invisible because it has no name.
A phase that has no name gets skipped.
That is the whole point. As long as thinking a role through counts as a self-evident run-up, as something you do on the side, it is the first thing to fall away under pressure. What has no name cannot be demanded. Not put in the calendar, not put on an invoice, not checked. It is slack in the process. And slack gets squeezed out when things get tight.
Language creates what it touches. No one skips a medical check-up: it has a name, a date, a code on the bill. The same examination without a name, as "have a look at it sometime first", never happens. With roles it is exactly the same.
Hence the name. Pre-Recruiting turns a good habit into a discipline. "Someone really should" becomes a step with a beginning, an end and a result. Role first. Then the search.
The order was always right.
Only the word was missing.
Now there is one.
Michael von Hirschfeld, Pre-Recruiting pioneer
