The Steal-the-Listing Operator Hire Method
Reverse-engineer real job posts to define and attract your operations hire
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 83%
Jasmine Star treats hiring an operator as a research-and-writing problem rather than a guessing game. First she separates herself from the doing by listing everything she does and everything she wants the new hire to own, which sharpens the role. Then, instead of inventing a job description, she searches real listings across LinkedIn and role-specific boards under whatever title fits her stage and budget, chief of staff, head of operations, integrator, or office manager. She harvests the strongest listings for language, structure, and regional pay benchmarks. Her benchmark example, a company called Jetro, does three things well: it describes the role with precise specificity, it describes the candidate as a person with concrete traits, and it walks through an actual week in the life so applicants know exactly what they are signing up for. The mechanism is self-selection: the clearer and more concrete the listing, the more the right operator recognizes themselves and the wrong one steps aside.
Origin
Extracted from The Jasmine Star Show
Core principles
- 01Role clarity precedes candidate quality: the clearer your role description, the better people you source
- 02You already know how to ask questions, so use questions to define the role you cannot yet name
- 03You do not have to invent a job description from scratch, you can mine existing listings for language, structure, and pay benchmarks
- 04Great listings sell the role AND the person, describing who the candidate is, not just what they will do
- 05A concrete week-in-the-life lets the right candidate self-select and the wrong one opt out
- 06Hire an operationally-minded thinker, not a title, someone who optimizes a plan rather than just executes it
How to run it
- 1
Separate the doing from the vision
List everything you currently do in the business, then list everything you want your operator to take off your plate. This is the role-clarity exercise a recruiter walked Jasmine through before her COO hire.
Pro tip Include projects you keep postponing, like systematizing onboarding, so the hire starts with a clear backlog.
- 2
Pick the title that fits your stage and budget
Decide whether you are hiring a chief of staff, head of operations, integrator, or office manager. Titles carry different pay expectations and skill sets, so choose the one that matches your budget and org size.
Pro tip A chief-of-staff search can surface strong operational candidates at a lower budget than a full COO.
Watch out A chief of staff echoes the CEO but is not necessarily responsible for operations, so read past the title to the actual duties.
- 3
Search real listings for your chosen title
Go to LinkedIn and role-specific boards and search the exact title. Read how other companies describe the person and the responsibilities so you learn how to attract what you want.
Pro tip Search adjacent and industry-specific titles too, like 'integrator' in the digital space, to widen your language pool.
- 4
Harvest language and pay benchmarks
Pull the phrases, responsibility breakdowns, and salary ranges from the strongest comparable listings, including ones from your own cost-of-living region, to benchmark what you should pay.
Pro tip Compare the same national employer across two cities to see how pay scales with local cost of living.
- 5
Write the role with crystal-clear specificity
Draft your listing so the responsibilities and who the person reports to are unmistakable. Vague listings attract vague applicants.
Pro tip State who the hire reports to explicitly, since strong operators want to know they report directly to the CEO.
- 6
Describe the candidate as a person
Add a 'you as a person' section listing concrete traits, high-energy, highly organized, thrives in uncertainty, so candidates can recognize themselves beyond a skills checklist.
Pro tip Frame traits so the right person feels seen and the wrong person self-selects out.
- 7
Walk through a week in the life
Map a Monday-to-Friday of the actual role, real meetings, real problems, real projects, so applicants know exactly what they are signing up for before they apply.
Pro tip Include a recurring frustration the hire would fix, showing the kind of problem-solving you expect.
In the wild
Jasmine studied a listing from a company called Jetro that set a new bar for her. It described the head-of-operations role with precise specificity, named who they report to, then added a 'you as a person' section and a full Monday-to-Friday week in the life covering async CEO alignment, digging into a 30% software-cost jump, and automating a repetitive vendor form. Applicants knew the role before applying.
→ Jasmine reset her own hiring bar, resolving to write listings that specific for every future team member.
A specialist doctor Jasmine saw wanted to leave a group practice and open her own but said she had no idea how to find an office manager. Jasmine pulled up LinkedIn, searched medical and dental office manager roles, and showed how to find comparable listings and pay ranges, benchmarking a Santa Barbara dental office manager at 75,000 to 90,000 as a proxy for Manhattan Beach.
→ The doctor gained a concrete way to define and price the operations role she could not previously name.
To show the method transfers across industries, Jasmine searched 'integrator', the term Gino Wickman coined in Traction for an operations lead, and found a certified EOS implementer's listing that broke responsibilities into client experience, client management, administration, and special project management, with fifteen specifics under administration alone.
→ Demonstrated how mining industry-specific titles yields the exact language to build a detailed listing.
Common mistakes
Hiring fast without processes first
Founders scale, feel pressure, and rush to hire anyone. Without processes in place the team repeats work, miscommunicates, and wastes time, and the founder becomes the bottleneck everyone comes to with questions.
Writing a vague job description
A listing that only states duties without specificity, reporting lines, candidate traits, or a real week-in-the-life fails to attract or filter the right operator.
Fixating on the title instead of the thinking
Insisting on a COO or director-of-ops title can cause you to miss operationally-minded candidates who optimize plans but do not carry the exact title you expected.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders at the scaling stage who are drowning in operations and need to write a listing that attracts a true operator.
Not ideal for
Very early solo founders with no processes or budget to support an operations hire yet.
From the transcript
“She walked me through and said, Jasmine, I want you to list all the things you're doing, and then I want you to list all…”
“Not only are they describing the role with crystal clear specificity, they're also talking about them as a human.”
“I would want to see when a job's descriptions, how were they describing that person. So I knew how to create a listing to start…”
From the episode
How to Find and Hire the Perfect COO or Operations Specialist