Stop Looking for a Unicorn Employee

26 Oct

Wanted: Administrator.

Must have excellent organisational skills.

Also needs Canva, social media, email marketing, bookkeeping, website management, CRM experience, SEO knowledge, event management, copywriting, project management and advanced Excel.

And ideally be able to read the founder's mind.

Salary: £26,000.

Sound familiar? 😂

I've seen variations of these job adverts many times, and I always think the same thing:

You're not looking for an administrator. You're looking for an entire department disguised as one person.

It happens particularly easily in small and growing organisations.

You know you need help. There's too much work sitting with the founder or senior team, things aren't getting done consistently and employing somebody feels like the logical next step.

So you start writing the job description.

Administration goes on first.

Then you remember somebody needs to manage social media.

The CRM could do with some attention.

Nobody really owns the email marketing.

The website needs updating.

There's an event coming up.

And while we're recruiting, wouldn't it be useful if they could do a little bookkeeping too?

Individually, every request sounds perfectly reasonable.

Put them all together and you've created a role that very few people could genuinely do well.

Generalists are brilliant

I want to be really clear about this because I've built much of my own career on having a broad skillset.

Good generalists are incredibly valuable.

They can see connections between different areas of a business, turn their hand to different things and often become the people who keep an organisation moving.

I'm a huge advocate for them.

But being a good generalist doesn't mean being an expert in everything.

I know my own limitations. There are things people within my team can do better and faster than I can.

So I want them doing those things.

That's not a weakness in my skillset.

That's sensible resourcing.

The problem comes when a business expects one person to move seamlessly between completely different disciplines and deliver specialist-level results in all of them.

Administration, bookkeeping, marketing strategy, SEO, copywriting and project management aren't interchangeable skills simply because they can all be performed on a laptop.

How the unicorn job develops

Very few businesses deliberately create one of these roles.

Usually, it happens gradually.

You recruit someone to solve the biggest immediate problem.

Perhaps you need an administrator.

They're brilliant.

A few months later somebody asks:

"Could you also look after Instagram?"

They give it a go.

Then:

"Could you update the website while you're there?"

And:

"Do you know anything about email marketing?"

Then the person who originally joined to provide administrative support somehow becomes responsible for your CRM, website, social media, events and half of your marketing.

Two years later, their role bears very little resemblance to the job they were recruited to do.

And because they're capable and helpful, they keep saying yes.

Until eventually either they're overwhelmed, the quality starts slipping or important work simply isn't getting the attention it needs.

One person can only have so much capacity

There's another problem with the unicorn model.

Even if you find someone with an unusually broad range of skills, they still only have one person's capacity.

If they're organising an event this week, something else may have to wait.

If they're spending a day creating marketing content, they're not doing the administration.

If a big project suddenly needs attention, the regular work doesn't magically disappear.

This is something I think growing businesses need to understand when they talk about capacity.

Having one person responsible for ten different areas doesn't mean you have capacity in ten different areas.

You have one person's time being divided between them.

And as the organisation grows, that division becomes increasingly difficult.

Are you recruiting a role or collecting tasks?

Before writing a job advert, I'd stop and look at everything you've put into it.

Ask yourself:

Does this genuinely describe one coherent role?

Or have you collected all the things nobody else currently owns and put them into one job description?

That's a very different thing.

Try grouping the responsibilities.

Perhaps you've actually got:

Operational support: inboxes, diaries, CRM updates, documents and administration.

Marketing: social media, email campaigns, copy and content.

Finance: bookkeeping, invoicing and financial administration.

Projects: coordination, timelines, suppliers and delivery.

Digital: website management, systems and automation.

Suddenly the problem becomes much easier to see.

You may still decide that one broad generalist role is exactly what your organisation needs.

But you might discover you're trying to squeeze four or five different capability requirements into one salary.

What if you bought a slice of each skill instead?

This is where fractional business support gives SMEs, charities and CICs another option.

You may not need a full-time marketer.

Perhaps you need four hours of really good marketing support.

You may not need an employed project manager.

Perhaps you need one for the duration of a particular project.

You may not need a full-time EA.

Perhaps you need consistent administrative support every week.

You might need bookkeeping every month, website expertise occasionally and additional event support twice a year.

You don't necessarily need five employees.

You need access to five different capabilities at the points your organisation needs them.

That's fractional resourcing.

A slice of the right expertise when the business needs it.

Fractional support isn't simply another name for a VA

I think this distinction is important.

There are brilliant Virtual Assistants providing everything from traditional administration to highly specialised support.

But fractional resourcing is less about a particular job title and more about how you build capability around an organisation.

Instead of asking one person to cover everything, you identify what skills are required and access the appropriate expertise in the amount you need.

For a smaller organisation, that can create access to a breadth of experience that would be incredibly expensive to recreate internally.

And it can work alongside employees.

This isn't an argument for replacing employed teams with outsourced ones.

Your core internal team might provide the continuity and organisational knowledge you need, while fractional specialists fill particular gaps around them.

The smartest structure is often a mixture.

Stop comparing people. Start designing the resource.

This is where I think the conversation around outsourcing needs to become more strategic.

The question isn't simply:

"Should we employ or outsource?"

I'd ask:

What work needs doing regularly?

What needs specialist expertise?

What needs somebody embedded in the organisation?

What fluctuates?

What only exists because of a particular project?

What could be automated?

What requires human judgement and relationships?

What expertise do we need but couldn't justify employing full-time?

And importantly:

What should sit with the same person — and what shouldn't?

Once you've answered those questions, you can design the resource around the work rather than trying to force all the work into one role.

This is why I've built Ducks In A Row differently

At Ducks In A Row, I don't expect one associate to know everything.

I want the opposite.

I want people who know what they're really bloody good at.

If something needs marketing expertise, I want the right marketing brain looking at it.

If it's bookkeeping, I want someone who understands bookkeeping.

If it's administration, systems, project management, events or another specialist area, I want the work sitting with somebody who knows what they're doing.

And if we need to step back and work out what the problem actually is before anybody starts doing anything, that's where strategic support comes in.

That means a client doesn't necessarily have to find and manage six different people themselves.

They can access different capabilities through one support structure.

For me, that's one of the most exciting things about fractional outsourcing for smaller organisations.

Before you advertise your next role...

Take another look at the job description.

If it contains administration, marketing, finance, projects, events, websites, CRM, SEO and seventeen different software platforms, you may not have discovered the world's most exciting administrator role.

You may have discovered that your organisation needs several different skills.

Separate the tasks.

Group them into capabilities.

Work out how frequently you need each one.

Then decide which genuinely belong together.

Some may form a brilliant permanent role.

Some may be better outsourced.

Some may require fractional expertise.

Some could be automated.

And you may discover that some don't need doing anymore.

Your organisation doesn't need one person who can somehow do everything.

It needs the right work in the right hands.