"We need a senior marketer" is not a role. Here's what one actually looks like

Most open roles are written the same way: a title, a list of past experience the company would like the candidate to have, and a paragraph of responsibilities that could describe several different jobs. It reads like a role. It functions like a guess.

What's missing from a typical job spec?

Two things, almost always. What the person actually owns, meaning the outcomes they are accountable for, not the tasks they perform. And what they get to decide alone, versus what they need to bring to someone else. Without those two things written down, the role is defined by whoever fills it, which means two people in sequence can hold the identical title and do meaningfully different jobs, and the company has no way to notice until something goes wrong.

What does a role canvas actually contain?

Before a job spec, before the posting goes out, we write four things down for the role, kept to one page.

Purpose: the one or two sentences explaining why this role needs to exist at all, connected directly to a goal the company actually has. Not "support the marketing function." Something specific enough that a stranger could tell whether a candidate would satisfy it.

Outcomes owned: what this person is accountable for delivering, stated as results, not activities. Not "manage the content calendar." Something closer to "inbound demand grows at a defined rate without proportional spend increase."

Decisions owned: the calls this person makes alone, the calls they make with input from named others, and the calls that still belong somewhere else. This is the part almost every job spec skips entirely, and it is the part that determines whether the eventual hire feels like they were given a job or handed a task list.

Interfaces: who this role depends on, and who depends on it, stated plainly enough that both sides know it going in.

Why does this change who applies and how they perform?

A vague role produces a vague signal, and strong candidates are unusually good at sensing that a role has not been thought through. Precision does the opposite: a sharply scoped canvas attracts people who read it and think, that is specifically what I am good at, rather than people applying because the title sounds senior.

It also changes the first ninety days. Onboarding built from a real canvas is a handover of specific ownership and specific decisions, not a tour of the company followed by a hope that the role clarifies itself. That is the difference between someone landing in weeks and someone still finding their footing at month four.

Isn't this a lot of effort for one hire?

It takes a few hours, once, for a role the company may hold for years. Compare that to the cost of a mis-scoped senior hire: a slow ramp, a quiet mismatch nobody quite names, and eventually a departure that gets attributed to fit rather than to a role that was never actually defined. The canvas is cheaper than any single one of those outcomes, and it only has to be built once per role, not once per hire into it.