The role has been open for three months. What to check before posting the advert again.

When a search stalls, two things are worth checking: whether the mandate asks for qualities that do not go together, and whether the right people exist but never look at adverts.

The difference matters because the remedies do not mix. If the mandate is contradictory, more exposure does not help: it brings the same candidates who fail on the same questions. If the market is hard to reach, a better-written advert still does not reach people who are not looking.

Example: recruiting a maintenance manager

Take a hypothetical situation, but a recognisable one for a manufacturing company in Bihor. A maintenance manager is being sought. The job description lists, one under the other: leading the maintenance team, the equipment investment plan, negotiating with parts suppliers, and availability for call-outs across all three shifts.

Each requirement is reasonable on its own. Together they describe three people: a technical lead, an investment person and a technical buyer, who is also on the phone at night. Someone who does the investment plan well usually no longer wants call-outs on the night shift. Someone good at rapid interventions has rarely built a capital budget.

The role is not impossible to fill. It is just that, written this way, nobody can be compared with anybody: each candidate is strong on a different third and weak on the rest, and the discussion in the team goes round in circles.

Six questions before you repost the advert

These are questions for the hiring manager, in a single one-hour session. The answers get written down, not remembered.

The fourth question resolves more blockages than it looks. Many processes stall not because candidates are missing, but because three people hold a veto and none of them is obliged to decide.

Criteria you can observe

„Excellent leadership" cannot be assessed and cannot be compared. An observable criterion describes a situation and a behaviour: has led a maintenance team across three shifts and can explain, on a concrete case, how they reduced unplanned downtime on one line — what they changed in the servicing plan, what the team pushed back on, and how they measured the result.

A criterion like that can be checked in the interview, through the same questions for everyone, and it can be scored. With four or five criteria of this kind, the discussion in the team gets considerably shorter.

The commute, the hours, the search area

When the mandate is clean and the role still will not fill, the market side comes next. Four things get checked here, in the order in which they can be changed: the real distance to the site and what the journey looks like at shift start, the hours required against those usual for the position, the salary budget against what is paid today for the same work in the area, and the area we search in.

The search area is the one most often treated superficially. If the profile you are after works in five companies in the county and two in the neighbouring ones, that is the universe of the search — not „the Romanian market". From that point on, the discussion is no longer about the advert, but about who contacts them, with what message, and what you can offer so they will listen.

The order matters: first clean up the mandate, then look at the market. The other way round, you end up paying more for a role nobody can do.

Shall we go through the six questions together?

That is how every project of recruitment starts with us. If the role is in Oradea or in Bihor county, see also the page dedicated to the local market.

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