Builder vs. Steady State: Why You Keep Hiring the Wrong A Player

I'm working with a handful of clients right now on hiring strategy, and one sentence keeps coming up in almost every conversation: "I want the best person. Somebody who can do the job today and grow it into something I can't even imagine yet."

That's a great goal. It's also, more often than not, the reason the hire doesn't work out.

Here's what actually happens. You write the job description, maybe with some help from an AI tool that also hands you the interview questions. You bring in someone clearly skilled, clearly an A player on paper. And six months in, they're not delivering the value you thought you were buying.

It's entirely possible to hire top talent and still hire the wrong talent for your business. This is why.

There are only two types of people at work

Not personality types. Not Enneagram numbers. Two operating modes, and every person leans toward one.

Builders are the idea people. They move fast, take risks, and love bringing something new to life. In operations, this is often called the integrator. A builder can sit in any function, marketing, sales, HR, ops, but their instinct is always the same: find the opportunity and exploit it. They're magnetic to be around because the air changes when they walk in. Builders are what you need when you want to reinvigorate a stalled team or scale into something new.

Steady state people are the ones obsessed with running the thing well. They live for the handoffs, the repeatable process, the "how do we do this a little better every single time." They can also sit in any function. And they are what you need if you want a business that actually scales, because builders without steady state people around them will rebuild the boat mid-voyage every time they come back from a conference with a new idea.

Miss this distinction and you will hire the wrong person for the role, over and over, no matter how talented they are.

The exercise to run before you write another job description

If you've hired for the same role more than once and it hasn't worked, that's a flag worth paying attention to. Here's the diagnostic I use with clients.

Grab a piece of paper and make two columns for the role you can't seem to fill well:

1. What did the person actually do, day in and day out? Not the job description. What you personally watched them do.

2. What did you wish they were doing that they weren't?

Now compare both lists to the actual job description. Were they doing things nobody wrote down? Were they missing things that were spelled out clearly?

Most of the time, the answer isn't "we hired someone incompetent." It's that the job description didn't specify how performance would be measured, so the person defaulted to whatever worked at their last job. Without a document that says this is what you're doing and this is how we'll know you did it well, people fill in the blank with their own assumptions, no matter how many conversations you've had.

Run this exercise honestly and it tells you one of three things: your job description is missing real expectations, it includes things you've since realized you don't actually want, or the role itself was never clearly defined as builder work or steady state work in the first place.

Know which one you are before you hire

This is the part founders skip, and it's the one that matters most.

Some of us wake up at 2 a.m. with a new idea for the business. We walk into the Monday team meeting with a totally different direction than we had on Friday. That's a builder.

Some of us picked one product, one service, one way of doing things, and we intend to run it to the end of the earth as close to perfectly as possible. That's steady state.

You are almost certainly one or the other, even though most of us carry pieces of both. And once you know which one you are, hiring gets simple: you need the yin to your yang. Builders need steady state people around them, especially in leadership roles, to pressure-test ideas, check capacity, and ask if the timing actually makes sense. Steady state founders need a builder somewhere close by, or the business plateaus and quietly declines because nobody is pushing it forward.

Put two builders together in a leadership seat and, in my clients' words, you just build things. Fast, exciting, and often without anyone checking if the team, the customers, or the systems can actually absorb it.

Why your A players keep leaving

I recently watched someone on LinkedIn describe their accomplishments at a high-profile company, explaining they were pivoting to a new opportunity. Within thirty seconds it was obvious: that person is a builder. They built the thing they were hired to build, got asked to run and optimize it long-term, and left because that was never their job.

A builder will stay with you for years if you keep handing them things to build and then hand those things off to someone else to run. Ask a builder to run the same thing forever and you will lose them, no matter how good the compensation or the culture.

It took me over twenty years and roughly forty roles across my own career to recognize I'm a builder. I once left a ten-year career because a project ended and what was left was maintenance. I was 28 and thought it would end me. Once I understood that about myself, I could see it in every business I've worked with since, and it completely changed how I diagnose hiring problems for clients.

Where to start

Don't write another job description until you've done two things: run the audit above on the roles that keep turning over, and get honest about whether you're a builder or a steady state operator yourself. It's not the candidate's job to figure out which one your business needs. It's yours, before you ever post the role.

If you run the audit and land on "I genuinely don't know what this role needs from here," that's exactly the kind of conversation I have with founders every week, book a free consultation.

We'll look at your hiring pattern together, figure out whether the role needs a builder or a steady state person, and you'll leave with a clearer job description whether or not we ever work together.

Melissa Franks is the founder of On Call COO and host of the Optin Podcast, where she helps founders move from surviving to thriving in business.