Episode Notes

In this episode of our four-part mini series on hiring the right senior leaders, Mino Vlachos, Managing Director and Co-Founder of The 3Peak Group, reconnects with Shruti Chaudhary, a global recruitment leader at Avomind, to explore one of the most underrated drivers of hiring success: role clarity.

From the inside of mid-sized organizations and the outside view of global executive recruiting, Mino and Shruti unpack why unclear roles create chaos, why “unicorn hires” almost always backfire, and how expectations shape the entire hiring pipeline—from candidate experience to long-term retention.

Through vivid analogies (including a memorable one about children’s football games), they discuss how organizations drift into heroics, overcompensation, and system breakdown—and what CEOs can do to build roles that are functional, sustainable, and scalable.

If you’ve ever tried to fill a role that secretly contains 16 jobs, struggled to align internal stakeholders, or wondered why a Chief of Staff role keeps becoming a black hole for responsibilities, this episode offers both clarity and practical guidance.

Podcast Highlights

🔍 Why Role Clarity Is a Growth Imperative

Clear expectations dramatically improve hiring speed, reduce candidate drop-off, and support healthy onboarding.
When expectations are vague, misaligned, or contradictory, organizations see stalled searches, unhappy candidates, brand damage, and fast turnover.

🎯 “Are you hiring a role—or backfilling a hero?”

Mino breaks down how organizations slide into systemic compensation: one person covering five roles, teams bending reality, and companies masking structural gaps.
If you’re backfilling a hero, you’re not hiring a role—you’re recreating dysfunction.

⚽ The Football Analogy CEOs Remember

Startups and even corporates often operate like children chasing a soccer ball—everyone runs toward whatever problem appeared last.
Mature systems look more like professional teams: defined positions, maintained structure, and coordinated performance.

🦄 The Rise of the “Unicorn Role”

Shruti names the top two unicorn roles she sees globally:
Chief of Staff (the ultimate catch-all)
Operations leaders (every company defines the job differently)
These roles often hide organizational chaos, unclear KPIs, and missing org design.

📉 When Internal Chaos Leaks Into the Hiring Process

AI-generated job descriptions remove nuance—real clarity comes only from real human thinking.
Misalignment between founders, chiefs of staff, and department leads shows up immediately in recruiting conversations.
If internal communication is messy, the hiring pipeline will be too.

🧭 Practical Guidance for Leaders

Founders and CEOs: Spend time understanding the actual role before delegating the JD to HR or AI. Think like a system architect, not a firefighter.
Hiring Managers & Recruiters: Ask unapologetically direct questions. Get crystal clear about KPIs, stakeholders, and what the role must look like in 6–12 months.
Internal Talent Teams: When leaders won’t align, facilitate the conversation—don’t skip it. Lack of alignment guarantees downstream problems.

💡 Two Pieces of Parting Advice

Shruti: Act as if you were hiring for this role. What would you need to know? Ask every question.
Mino: Before hiring, understand the role functionally, relationally, and operationally. Improvisation doesn’t scale.

Transcript

Mino Vlachos: Hello, my name is Mino Vlachos and I am the managing director and co founder of the 3Peak Group. With 3Peak, we work with CEOs of mid sized companies to support them during their growth phase. So we help them to scale from a relational system where everyone knows everyone to an organized system where we enable organized structures but maintaining human connection.

Shruti Chaudhary: Hi everyone, I'm Shruti Chaudhary. I am part of Avomind. I lead the Dark team. Within our mind. We are a boutique recruitment firm focusing on commercial strategy and analytics talent globally. We love working with companies that are looking to expand into new areas, looking for very niche roles or scaling up very, very quickly. Speed is our core value and we work globally. We have teams based in Berlin, Jakarta, Barcelona and Toronto. We do come with a very extensive global network and I'm super happy to be here.

Mino Vlachos: Wonderful. And what I love about us working together, Shruti 3 Peak Avomind is we get to see similar topics but from two very different angles. So we support with consulting companies and some of the kind of inner decision making and capabilities that they're building. And then Avomind is really helping with their recruitment and supporting them to find the right talent. So our mini series is going to be focused on finding the right senior leaders. So one of the core competencies and needs of organizations as they're building and growing is finding the right senior leaders. So we're going to break this miniseries into four parts and we're going to be looking at four different components when it comes to finding the right senior leaders. So as part of our mini series on hiring the right senior leaders, our second topic is all around role clarity and setting expectations which is one of the most important parts of being able to hire the right person. So ultimately we're going to get into why it's such an important topic and how it benefits both the company and the person interviewing to have a clear understanding of what they're stepping into. And so Shruti, as you're working with organizations and you're helping them to fill the kind of pipeline and to hire senior leaders, can you tell me like what's the difference on your side if there is kind of some clear job roles and expectations versus like it's not very clear what you're looking for, right?

Shruti Chaudhary: So when it comes to organizations which have very clear idea of what they want and they've set those expectations right, the partnership is likely to work out well in the long term. The process is much faster. The ratio of people dropping out through the process. And even after joining, especially within the first six months to one year, timeline is much lower. We see more success with those organizations. Whereas if there is a mismatch in expectations, there are a lot of sparks flying, not in a good way. So you see them facing challenges through the process, whether it's the timeline, whether it's how happy their candidates are or whether it's their brand. I think that's another aspect that gets affected. And of course, if it's not working out, things will fall apart. It's a cost to both parties. That's, that's a very, very common thing that I see across, especially startups. I think bigger organizations, people still tend to stay a little longer, even if things are not exactly how they expect them to be. But that's not the case with smaller companies. What's, what's your experience on this front?

Mino Vlachos: A lot of the work we do is helping kind of, let's say, organize companies going into a moment of scaling. What I talk with a lot of CEOs about is the need to create a system. So you need to create kind of a system that is able to function and it's a success system of success. Analogy sometimes I use is when, when little kids are playing football, you see like one kid kicks the ball and all little kids run after it like this big swarm of bees, right? And it's this, there's no roles. It's just, I kick the ball, I run after it. In a lot of startups, but honestly, even a lot of corporates, there is the mentality of like, someone kicked the ball, everyone ran after the ball. And what I really try to coach CEOs and leaders is if you look at a professional football team, you'll notice that they have roles. There's a striker, there's a defender, someone playing on the wing in the midfield, and they don't leave their position, right? Like that's the goal, is that like you don't leave the position. It's the system is supposed to win. It's the kind of the, the way the manager structured the team. And if the manager wants to make substitutions, they can do that, right? So they can say, okay, like we're weak in this area, we're going to take out and, and change the, the orientation of the system. And then you might have a different outcome. And so it's, what ends up happening is like, let's say there's like one player that's weaker, then you end up compensating, so someone starts to drift a little bit. Left, someone starts to drift a bit, right? And then all of a sudden you end up in like this without even noticing it. You end up in a different system than the one that was intended. And so by covering up the weaknesses, you might be able to survive the match. But over time, that gets exposed again and again. And in an organization, a company, you actually have the same kind of dynamic where either you don't have a system at all, you don't have roles, or you do, but there are weaknesses and people start being heroic and there's compensations and people trying to catch things from falling. It's very well intending, but it kind of masks and covers up for like what is actually the true correct system that will help this company grow. So if you look at it from a systemic point of view, you need to have roles and those roles, people need to stay in those roles and not go do a thousand things outside their role that would distort the field and distort the system. So this is where, like, if you're trying to hire for someone, are you trying to backfill a role or you're trying to backfill a hero is the way I would start to put it. Because if there's one person who's doing 16 jobs, then you're trying to fill backfill a hero. And I don't know how you go and I mean, I'll ask you, like, I don't know how to backfill for a position. And that's why I would assume it's hard to maybe hire for startups where it's like, yeah, I need someone to do marketing and sales and administrative and bookkeeping and this and that. And it's like, I don't know how to find all those skills in one human being. That's like a. I would think that's a very difficult thing. But I don't know, you tell me, like what, what happens when you interact with those situations where it's like, I've got a, you know, a chief of staff that does 16 jobs, I need to backfill this person. How do you even go about that?

Shruti Chaudhary: Right? That's, that's what we call the unicorn position, right? They want this person to be a unicorn who's just there.

Shruti Chaudhary: So I think that's fair. We try to define things as much as we can from our side for them. What is it that you're looking for? What is it that's present in the market? That's an important input that we give to our stakeholders saying, all right, you're looking in this area, but you're looking this person to do xyz. That proportion of finding that person is really small. Do you want to expand it? It's not like we are not attacking that one small target. But if you want to hire within this timeline, it's important that you expand or divide the responsibilities and then kind of conquer each area. So from our side, as a recruiter, I would say do not look at these positions just as open positions or open vacancies that you have to fill. Get context. Who are they backfilling for? What did this person do, what kind of experience this person brought in? And if that's possible, that's not possible. If not, be super direct in communication. That's one challenge that we see on the outside. So how you said there are systems that may not always work on the other side as a recruiter, how we analyze that is the communication doesn't work from the organization side. They cannot define what they want, what they are looking for. They don't know what the KPIs are going to be for this person. They don't know who they're going to work with, who their stakeholders are, or what this role is going to look like in six months, 12 months or longer. So if there's chaos inside, it kind of reflects outside as well. And then that also translates into the process somehow it does trickle down during the hiring process as well. So that's where it's important to kind of give them a clear picture what the reality is and try to segregate responsibilities and define roles better.

Mino Vlachos: So do you have a sense, I'm just curious, like when you're handed a job description from a client, how quickly can you figure out, like if this is going to be easy or hard or chaotic or orderly. Is it something that's even like, can you even ascertain that from the job description itself?

Shruti Chaudhary: I think job descriptions, not as much because most job descriptions these days are AI generated.

Shruti Chaudhary: So not as much, but the first call with whoever our stakeholders are, especially if it's a founder that gives you an input very, very quickly. The way they talk about the company, whether they are able to sell their company to us or not, that's a very simple way to figure out what do they understand the vision? Do they have a solid vision or how different members of the team are working with each other and working with us. Does the chief of staff speak the same language as the founder or is it completely different? So I think these small flags that you see in conversations is how we figure out what their vision is, whether they know or not. And that's when we step in analyzing the situation needed, not needed. Give them a good input about the market. And it's important. I think the other important part for a recruiter is to understand the market as well, especially for the role that you're hiring for. If you have a good insight on that, then you can probably influence the ultimate requirement.

Mino Vlachos: I just curiosity, I'm putting you a little on the spot, but I'm just really interested is do you find that there are certain roles that are the unicorn roles you're talking about. What roles tend to be like, do you see patterns of like, oh, it tends to be like Chief of staff tends to be the unicorn they ask for or sales or like what. What have you seen in your career? Like, they tend to ask for unicorns and where area. What areas?

Shruti Chaudhary: Chief of staff is definitely one of those roles. There is never a clear description of what this person scores going to do. They should understand sales. They should also understand finance. They should look at the cost, but they should also focus on increasing revenue. And there's operations. Right. So cheaper stuff is definitely one role like that. I feel like operations roles are also fairly complex and each organization works very differently. They want different things. So that's another role where people would expect a lot and may not look at specialization as much. I think the most complex are these two, apart from the CEOs and the MDs. So yeah, I would say these two are the other ones that come to top of mind.

Mino Vlachos: Okay, that's pretty fun. I think Chief of staff, and I'm a big fan of chief of Staff. I think they tend to be pretty remarkable, talented people. But from a role perspective, it's funny that you say that because that's exactly the role that I find is like, like, it's like where we just put everything that we like, we don't know what to do with is like it gets shoved in this one role and it's one person and it ends up being a very chaotic place. So even like when I was referring at some point to like, oh, someone with like 16 jobs in one, I'm like, I was actually thinking of an example of a chief of staff. It is like a, a weird litmus test. It's like a test of like what's happening in your company is like almost look at the chief of staff. How clear is that role? How chaotic is it? How much of a hero unicorn does that individual need to be? And I also have found anecdotally that a lot of organizational like or like dysfunction, because this person ends up being the center of a lot of the responsibility and like tying things in the glue that holds it together. They also can be the nexus point of like where the chaos, the dysfunction, the problems. Oftentimes when we go into organizations and it's like a total, total mess and it's like about to go into lawsuits and you know, very kind of chaotic things. When you trace it back, there's usually that role is like somewhere playing a key role in like what's happening.

Shruti Chaudhary: Interesting, interesting. I think I want to follow up on that one later after this conversation as well. Would love to hear more on that.

Mino Vlachos: Yeah. So when we're talking about kind of creating the role clarity and expectations from a kind of like an internal side, I mean I hear, I hear what you're sharing with like the AI driven thing, I think from a kind of the internal side of the organization, I would, I would just welcome. Invite CEOs, founders, senior leaders to try and take a little bit of a crack at it before putting AI on the task. I'm for AI. I think they can help a lot with job descriptions. I'm not against it. And like really kind of sit, I think, and reflect on the system that you want to create, like a sports manager and what are the critical functions that you require of each of these roles. And I believe like that exercise, it shouldn't just be outsourced to hr. It shouldn't just be outsourced to AI. Like there is a critical component of reflecting on what system you would like to build. And it's the type of system that will enable your company to perform and hit those KPI. Like all the things that we want the company to do. The system has to deliver on that or you're always going to be like a band of heroes, firefighting.

Shruti Chaudhary: I have a question for you over there, Meeno. You talked about bringing all these leaders together to kind of develop that system. As an internal recruiter, a challenge that I faced was bringing all these people together and aligning them on one thing. Any tips, any ideas on how one can handle that?

Mino Vlachos: It's. It's a bit tricky. I think there one. I mean obviously there needs to be some willingness to again, look and face the truth of like what's happening the organization. And some of it is there is like a little bit of an ego at times of like, either I'm afraid I avoid it or even like I should, I should like I'm a founder, I'm a CEO, I should know how to do this. I should be able to do this without taking into consideration that context changes. And this is like, one of the things that when we talk to organizations about scaling is, like, what's going to happen inside and outside of the company is going to change so rapidly and, like, complexity will increase so quickly. So we're working with a CEO recently, and she said that I'm realizing that, like, the complexity is just outpacing my ability to learn new skills. Like, things are just getting, like, way more heavy and hard to handle, and there's so many relational dynamics, and, like, I can't keep track of it. It's just. It's outpacing. It's outgrowing my capacity to deal with it. That's not a failure. That's just sometimes, like, things are, like, mismatched in how they're growing. So I say all of that to preface with it's like, but at some point, this is. The work we do is like, we need to get people in a room, and we get. We get people in a workshop and we start to look at, like, where are the kind of missing points in the system? And one way to look at it is, like, where are we compensating? So, funny enough, the unicorn role, the hero role. Like, again, back to the sports analogy. If you see, like, someone's a little bit weak, so someone who's stronger helps them out, I know it's like, runs counter to kind of, like, empathetic kind of leadership. But when we do that, we mask a systemic problem. So we can't actually support the role or the person in the role because we're always kind of bending reality to make things work, make things work, make things work. But we want to build a strong system, not just compensate and put, like, you know, tape everywhere and glue everywhere, and then it breaks at some point. So when we can get people in a room, what we can look at is like, let's be honest, where. Where is the tape? You know, where have you put the tape? Instead of putting, like, a really solid, you know, kind of foundation in the building, which is very vague in general, but that's like. I think the only way I have found to, like, try to really work on these systemic issues. And then all of a sudden, like, there can be an awakening moment of, like, whoa, we're missing a role. Like, actually, we are missing a role. We're missing a chief operation officer. And, like, we never had that role, but actually that will allow the CEO to like, whoa, pull out of the doing in the day to day and then be able to have other kind of responsibilities. So I don't know how helpful that is, but that's a little bit of how I would think about it.

Shruti Chaudhary: Oh, that could be a good, fair idea of how to kind of navigate it.

Mino Vlachos: So if you had. When it comes to like this whole topic of role clarity and setting expectations, if you had one piece of advice to give from all the experience that you have, what's a piece of advice that you would give to someone listening.

Shruti Chaudhary: I would say, as a hiring manager, put yourself in the hiring manager's shoes and don't be afraid to ask questions. Get as much clarity as you can on the role before you start hiring. And imagine if you were hiring for that role, how would you go about it? I think that that's what I would say. Yeah. What do you think?

Mino Vlachos: What I'll give is a bit impractical on purpose, but I believe you should try to hire for role higher roles that you have some, some level of understanding of how they function. Which means that like maybe if we're talking more about like a founder, do the role for a little bit of time to understand, like what is actually needed. Learn a little bit so you can ask the right questions or you can find the right people. But to your point, Shruti, I would say, like, you really do need to understand the role on a functional level, on a relational level, on a leadership level, like, really understand, like, what are the puzzle pieces and like a layer or two of detail under that. What am I really looking for? Like, what is needed to build this system? Otherwise it's going to be a lot of improvisation. And I don't believe improvisation can be scaled. So if you're looking to scale, then you have to find a way to make it work. Where if someone again goes on holiday or someone leaves your organization, they quit, then like, the system should be able to continue.

Shruti Chaudhary: Absolutely. No, I think that's, that's a great.

Mino Vlachos: And with that, we thank everyone for listening to this installment, this episode of our miniseries on hiring the right leadership. In the next episode, we're going to look a little bit more of how do you actually screen talent? How do you assess talent? Which should you be looking for when you're actually interviewing people? So that once you're at this step where you've identified the need, you have the role in mind, how do you actually start to interview and get the best folks?

Shruti Chaudhary: Awesome. Thank you, everyone.

Mino Vlachos: Thank you.