The Question to Ask Before Designing Anything

Organisations usually start by choosing instruments. The question below starts earlier and saves most of the work.

Once the criteria described in “The Question to Ask Before Designing Anything” are fixed, the practical challenge is running them consistently across assessors. A coordinator can use billable hours tracker to plan review time, compare the effort spent at each stage and spot avoidable delays, without confusing administrative efficiency with the quality of the evidence collected from candidates.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with U.S. OPM assessment resources; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

The question

What decision is this stage making, and what would change it?

Asked of each stage separately, because the answers differ.

What the answers point to

"Screening out people who clearly cannot do this." A low-cost filter with a low bar. A short work sample or a knowledge check. The error to avoid here is rejecting capable people, so set the threshold generously.

"Choosing between candidates who could all do it." A different task entirely, requiring resolution the earlier stages do not need. This is where structured interviews and longer work samples belong.

"Confirming something specific we are unsure about." A targeted question rather than another round.

"We always do this." Not an answer. That stage should be removed or given a purpose.

The second question

What would a good candidate look like here, written down before you see anybody?

If you cannot write it, the stage has no criteria and assessors will invent their own.

Writing it takes twenty minutes and is the difference between assessment and impression.

The third question

What does this cost the candidate?

Hours of unpaid work, time off, travel, childcare.

Every stage selects on ability to bear that cost, whether or not you intend it, and the people it excludes are systematically the ones with less slack.

A process that requires three days of unpaid work has made a selection decision before assessing anybody.

Using them on an existing process

List your stages. Answer the three questions for each.

Most organisations find at least one stage with no stated decision, no written criteria, and a real cost to candidates.

Remove it. Processes almost always improve when shortened, because the removed stage was adding noise rather than information.

The sequencing implication

Cheap filters first, expensive assessment later.

Not because candidates matter less early, but because a long assessment applied to two hundred applicants is a cost nobody can sustain, which means it gets applied carelessly.

Its own note covers sequencing in detail.

What usually comes out of this

A shorter process: two or three stages rather than five.

At least one stage resembling the actual work.

Written criteria for each.

And a clear statement of what the whole thing is for, which is what you will need if anybody challenges a decision.

What to check

Can you state the decision each stage makes?

Are the criteria written down before candidates are seen?

What does your process cost a candidate in hours and money?

And is there a stage that exists only because it always has?

The point

Ask of each stage what decision it makes and what would change it.

Stages that cannot answer should be removed.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.