Hiring for Overlap

When somebody leaves, most organisations write a job description from the previous one. That reproduces the concentration exactly, and the moment to do otherwise passes quickly.

The principles in “Hiring for Overlap” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating time analytics software can use it to coordinate recurring work, identify tasks concentrated on one person and plan realistic backup capacity, while treating the data as a prompt for knowledge transfer rather than as a substitute for speaking with the people who do the work.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with O*NET occupational information; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

Why the vacancy is the moment

Nobody currently holds the work, so redistributing it costs no negotiation.

The activities are visible, because somebody has been covering them badly and knows which hurt.

And the new person has no expectations to unlearn.

Three months later all three advantages are gone.

Redistribute before you write

Take the departed role's activities and ask, for each: does this belong here, or was it here because that person happened to do it?

Some will move to people who now partly cover them.

Some will be dropped, which the coverage period has just demonstrated is survivable.

Then write the description for what is left.

Deliberate overlap in the description

Include at least one activity that somebody else also does.

Say so in the advertisement: this role shares X with Y.

Which sets the expectation from day one, and avoids the conversation later where somebody feels their area is being encroached on.

What to look for in candidates

Willingness to document and explain, which is assessable: ask for an example of something they handed over.

Comfort with shared ownership rather than a preference for owning an area outright.

And breadth over narrow depth, at small scale, because a specialist in an organisation of ten is a dependency by definition.

None of this outweighs capability; it is a tiebreak between capable candidates.

Onboarding against concentration

Have the new person write the documentation for their own role as they learn it.

They are the only person who will ever see it fresh, and the window closes within about two months.

This is the single highest-value documentation opportunity an organisation gets and it is routinely missed.

The interim period

While the role is vacant, record what the coverers could not do.

That list is both the job description and the dependence map, produced free.

When you cannot redistribute

Sometimes the role is genuinely specialised and must be recreated as it was.

Then at minimum build the overlap into the plan for year one: who is the second person, and when do they learn.

Write it into the onboarding rather than leaving it as an intention.

What to check

Was your last job description written from the previous one?

Does any current role share an activity with another deliberately?

Did your last hire document their role during onboarding?

And did the vacancy period get recorded, or just survived?

The point

A vacancy is the cheapest moment to reduce concentration, and the advantage disappears within three months..

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.