Titles are nouns. Jobs are verbs. Write the verbs first.

Read the job description your board just approved. Ten-plus years in the industry. Proven track record. Established network. Executive presence. Every line describes what the person should be. Not one line says what they will do in week one.

Now picture the hire that description produces. Twenty-five years in, a vice-president title from a company everyone recognizes, a package around a quarter of a million all-in. Ten months later: four first meetings, one inherited pilot that hasn’t moved since spring, and a resignation letter explaining that the company “wasn’t ready to support the role.”

The uncomfortable part? The letter is right. You hired a noun. The job was a verb.

Track records don’t transplant

Here’s the assumption buried in “proven track record”: that results travel with the person. They mostly don’t. The $40 million region on that CV was produced by a system – a brand that opened doors, a sales development team feeding meetings, inbound leads from fifteen years of marketing, referenceable customers on speed dial, a legal department that turned contracts in days. The person was real. So was the machine around them. Only one of the two shows up on your payroll.

Demonstrated results in one context are no indication of delivery in a different context. Your context has no brand air cover, no inbound, no U.S. references yet, a proof kit still in draft. The verbs this job requires – open cold accounts, run first meetings solo, charter pilots, build the playbook while running it – might be verbs your impressive candidate hasn’t personally performed in fifteen years.

Regular readers of Traction in the U.S. will recognize the shape of this mistake. It’s “can’t we just find a distributor?” wearing a blazer – the same wish that someone else’s relationships can stand in for your strategy. One Nordic industrial company spent eighteen months with a national distributor who produced zero customers, then built its own proof kit and closed three in ninety days. A person fails you the same way: hired into a job nobody defined, running a playbook built somewhere else.

Helle Fjord put the principle cleanly in the Danish Export Association webinar series (in Danish) the hire must be wrapped in the strategy – the role and the person both deliberately crafted, then executed, to push the strategy forward. The strategy asks the question, and the question is never “who should we get?” It’s “what must get done?” That discipline governs hire two and hire five as much as the first hire.

TL;DR: Stop writing the requisition as a description of a person. Write it as a list of verbs: the 20 named accounts they call in week one, the motion they run, the pilots they charter, the two numbers they answer for on day 90. Then audit context twice – theirs (what machine produced the track record?) and yours (proof kit, repeatable ICP, teachable motion). Interview by making candidates do the job, not describe the old one. A modest CV that performs your verbs beats a marquee CV that performed someone else’s.

What a track record actually proves

Be fair: the CV proves the person can operate – inside the machine that produced it. The rolodex is context too: names weighted toward the employer the candidate just left, and a call answered out of courtesy still ends the way every U.S. deal ends – with a buyer asking for proof, a pilot path, and a reason this helps their Monday number.

A European technology company hired a seasoned and senior executive with more than 25 years’ experience in the industry, a rolodex with personal connections to decision makers, and a proven track record. The one key thing missing from the impressive CV: No experience building a company from scratch. No experience opening doors for a name nobody had ever heard of. No experience operating outside a robust organization. The resignation letter landed 10 months later. It was a $250,000 learning experience.

Three moves – all of them verbs

1. Write the job as verbs before you write the requisition

Start from your next twelve months – the beachhead, the 30–50 named accounts, the motion that already works in founder hands – and write the doing, on one page:

• Week one: call these 20 named accounts, with this proof kit, booking first meetings with these titles.
• The motion, step by step, as the founder runs it today – discovery, into a paid pilot, into a written conversion trigger.
• Quarter one: [X] first meetings with named accounts, [Y] pilots chartered with triggers attached.
• The two numbers on the day-90 scorecard – and nothing measured in “activity.”
• What the company supplies: the proof kit, the references, founder time every week.

If you can’t write the verbs, you don’t have a job opening. You have a wish with a salary.

2. Audit the context – theirs and yours.

Theirs: for every number on the CV, ask what produced it. Brand or no brand? Inbound or outbound? A team or solo? References on tap, or built from zero? Save the sharpest version for the reference call – the script is below.

Yours: three things must be true before the requisition opens. The proof kit exists – outcome numbers, a reference, a live integration, the security answers. The ICP repeats – your last three U.S. deals resemble each other on paper. The motion is teachable – the founder has run it enough times to teach it in a week. The field rule behind all three: first twelve months founder-led, one senior seller, two or three partners already selling into your ICP – and the founder in-market one week a month until ten U.S. customers.

Skip your side of the audit and the hire inherits discovery – founder work, because it takes the authority to change the product, the price, and the pitch mid-meeting. An employee has none of those powers. The failure arrives on schedule, whoever you hire.

3. Interview by doing, not describing.

The profile that survives is the seller-builder – a player-coach who has personally performed your verbs, at your stage, and can build the playbook while running it. So, make the interview a working session. Hand the candidate the proof kit and three accounts from your actual beachhead list: walk me through getting a first meeting with [title] at each – this week. Listen for whether they start from your proof and the buyer’s Monday number, or from “well, I know some folks over there.”

Then flip the rolodex question: not “who do you know?” but “show me how you reach someone you don’t.” Your verbs must outlive their contact list. And score day 90 in verbs completed – meetings with named accounts, pilots with triggers – not panels, not “brand-building.”

Scripts and tools

The interview prompt, verbatim:

• “Here are three accounts from our beachhead list and our proof kit. Walk me through, step by step, how you get a first meeting with [title] at each – this week.”

The reference-call question:

• “When [candidate] hit that number, what did the company provide – brand, inbound, Sales Development Representatives, references – and what did they build from zero?”

The board line, when the marquee CV shows up:

• “We’re not buying what someone was. We’re buying what they’ll do here – and here has none of the machinery that produced that CV.”

Decision lens – before you open the requisition

• Can you list the ten verbs of week one – the accounts, the calls, the meetings – right now, on one page?
• Take the candidate’s best number: how much of it was them, and how much was the machine around them?
• Does your context supply what the verbs need – the proof kit, the repeatable ICP, a motion you could teach in a week?

Think Slow. Act Fast. Win Big.

Think Slow. Write the verbs and audit both contexts before you meet a single candidate. The requisition is the last document you write, not the first.

Act Fast. Once the verb list is real, move – run the working-session interview this week. The seller-builders you want are employed and impatient, and a page of named accounts is exactly what recruits them.

Win Big. The hire who performs ordinary verbs in your context beats the résumé that performed extraordinary nouns in someone else’s.

Actions speak louder than words – and louder than résumés. Hire for what gets done.

If the requisition is open – or about to be – bring your twelve-month plan to a 25-minute First-Hire Clinic.  We’ll write the verb one-pager together – the accounts, the motion, the two numbers – and run the context audit on both sides. You leave with a job you can recruit against, or the honest list of what to fix first.

Book it here: 25-Minute First Hire Clinic

Thomas Riebs, JD

Partner

Traksjon

Think Slow. Act Fast. Win Big.

Los Angeles, California, USA

For more on turning American motion into American revenue, subscribe to the newsletter, Traction in the U.S.