The Competency Stack

The Competency Stack is a standard for defining everything a hire must clear before you open an interview loop. Every hire sits inside five layers of competency. The role: what this particular job requires. The level: what the seniority demands. The company: the must-haves that apply to every single person you hire. The stage: what the company’s size and maturity demand. The team: how this person fits the specific group of people they will work with. Most founders articulate only the first layer. [1] When the other four go undefined, your interviewers are each guessing at a different standard, and they are guessing differently.

Start from the MOC. The stack is an expansion of the C: the competencies someone needs to deliver the role’s outcomes. Write the role layer from the outcomes, then work down the stack.

For the level layer, steal from people who have already defined it. Kellogg’s line holds for the management track: managers are paid to drive results with some support, directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision, and VPs are paid to make the plan. [2] The same principle holds for individual contributors, where autonomy, influence, and accountability change at each tier. [3] Calibrate the depth of definition to your headcount. Under 20 people, know the levels at a high level. From 20 to 50, write enough down that two interviewers evaluating a director candidate agree on what “director” means. Past 50, you need real specificity.

The stage layer is about the organization, not the people. A five-person company needs people who build the machine; a 1,000-person company needs people who run it. Headcount, revenue, and the structure that comes with them change what the same role at the same level actually requires. Write down what your company’s moment demands, because “great at their last company” usually means great at their last company’s stage.

The team layer is about the specific humans this person will work alongside, and three questions force it into writing. First, where does the team sit in its own life: are they joining as the founding member or the tenth hire? A brand new team needs founding energy, an established one needs someone who earns trust before changing things, and a team inheriting a leader after a bad one needs repair skills before anything else. Second, what is the team’s temperament — quiet and heads-down, open-ended and exploratory, or loud and rowdy — and does this person move that temperature in the direction you need? Third, what are you augmenting: more of what the team already does well, or a complementary skill set that fills a gap nobody currently covers? “Great on their last team” fails the same way “great at their last company” does.

If you only interview for role-specific competencies, you will recognize the symptoms: people who can do the work but have attitude problems, people who are hard to motivate or do inconsistent work, people at the wrong level who execute fine but never lead, and a persistent feeling of “they looked good on paper, why isn’t this working?” [1]

The deeper cost is a vicious cycle. A mediocre hiring process attracts people who are comfortable with mediocre. Those people do not want to do the work of defining the stack, so you hire more mediocre people. A rigorous process runs the same cycle in the other direction. Great people are impressed by discipline, and they attract more great people. The cycle reinforces itself in whichever direction you let it go. [1]

Use it whenever you write the C of a MOC, and before you assemble any interview loop. Each layer should map to interviewers: somebody in the loop owns the role competencies, somebody owns level, somebody owns company, somebody owns stage, and somebody owns team. If a layer has no owner, nobody is evaluating it.

The stack is a closed-loop system, not a one-time exercise. You write a hypothesis of what each layer requires, run calibration calls to sharpen it, hire, and learn. Some of it you will discover the hard way: you hire someone who is missing a competency you did not know you cared about, and suddenly it is obvious. Make it explicit, fold it back into the stack, and run the next loop sharper.

The Competency Stack is a Management Craft original by Andy Sparks, first published as the “Competency Layers” card and renamed when it became a tool. [1] The original card taught three layers; the stage layer was added at the tool port, and the team layer was split out from it so each layer carries a single job. The level layer stands on Dave Kellogg’s definitions of what managers, directors, and VPs are paid to do [2] and the Holloway Guide’s treatment of how individual-contributor levels actually work. [3] The stack plugs into the MOC, whose lineage runs to the Scorecard in Who: The A Method for Hiring. [4]