The Calibration Call

The Calibration Call is a short research conversation you do before you talk to candidates for a role you do not fully understand yet. You talk with people who have done the job well, hired for it, or worked beside someone excellent in it. The point is not to outsource your judgment. The point is to learn what great looks like from people who have already lived the role.

Liz Wessel gave this practice the name “calibration call” and published a crisp set of questions for using it when you are hiring for a new role or function. [1] At Management Craft, the Calibration Call usually feeds directly into the MOC, the mission, outcomes, and competencies document that defines what you are actually hiring for. [2]

Lead with failure questions. If you ask what great looks like, people often give you polished abstractions: strategic, analytical, good communicator. If you ask what failed hires have in common, the conversation gets concrete. People remember the head of sales who spent the first quarter reorganizing the team instead of learning the product. They remember the VP of engineering who scaled process faster than trust. They remember the role that quietly required a partner function nobody had planned to hire.

The move is to treat failure as the negative space around excellence. If every failed hire could not make the plan, then plan-making is probably a core competency. If every failed hire ignored the first 90 days of context-building, then the onboarding plan needs to make context-building explicit. Do not leave the call with interesting notes. Convert the patterns into outcomes, competencies, interview questions, and first-90-day expectations.

Use two navigation questions to get to better people. Ask, “Who do you know who is best in class at this?” Then ask, “Who do you know who would know a lot of people who are best in class at this?” The second question is the one that gets you beyond your immediate network.

Founders often treat hiring a senior leader as if confidence can substitute for understanding. They will obsess over product detail, then hire a VP off vibes because they have never held the role themselves and do not know how to define it. A calibration call is the management equivalent of user research: before you design the role, you talk to people who understand the terrain.

This matters because role definition becomes the standard for everything that follows. The MOC, the job description, the interview loop, the onboarding plan, and the 30/60/90 evaluation all inherit the quality of your first assumptions. If those assumptions are vague, the whole process gets vague. Calibration calls make those assumptions visible before a candidate is sitting across from you.

Use the Calibration Call when you are hiring for a function, stage, or level you do not already understand from direct experience. It is especially useful before a first executive hire, a new function, or a role where your existing team can describe the pain but not the shape of excellence.

Do the calls before you open the role, before you write the job description, and before you ask interviewers to evaluate candidates. Two or three good conversations are often enough to expose the biggest gaps in your thinking. More can help, but the goal is not to become an expert in the function. The goal is to become clear enough to write the MOC and run a serious hiring process.

Liz Wessel coined the term “calibration call” and shared a practical version of the method in 2024. [1] Management Craft uses the practice as the fieldwork that makes the MOC sharper. The MOC itself draws from the Scorecard model in Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s Who: The A Method for Hiring. [2]