The MOC

The MOC is the document you write while you are getting ready to make a hire, before you talk to a single candidate. MOC stands for mission, outcomes, and competencies, the framework Geoff Smart and Randy Street laid out in their 2008 book Who: The A Method for Hiring, built on more than a thousand hours of interviews with hundreds of CEOs and a couple dozen billionaires. [2] My take? It’s the gold standard for hiring.

Figuring out what you actually need for a role is deceptively complicated. People think it is simple, but what you need a person to accomplish—the outcomes you need them to deliver—and the competencies it takes to get there are specific to your team, your company, and the size and stage you are at. The MOC is how you get clear on all of it, so that when you run the hiring process and filter people in or out, you and your team are filtering for the right things.

It is also how you find out what the role actually is. A lot of the time people think they need one thing, but when they write an MOC, they realize they need something completely different.

Start with outcomes. The mission is really a summary of the whole thing, and you cannot write the summary until you have written the essay. Treat the mission as the key line, and let everything else come first.

You do not know what competencies you need until you know the outcomes, so ask what you want this person to accomplish in the next 12 to 18 months. Have at least three; three to five is the sweet spot; eight is the ceiling and probably already too many. Trust your gut. Think in terms of big projects. If a sales operations person needs to lead a new CRM rollout, or a head of marketing needs to stand up a marketing automation system, ask what should be possible 12 to 18 months out that is not possible today, the things that will be routine and almost commoditized if this person succeeds. Give each outcome a sentence or two, and a metric or signal that tells you in black-and-white terms whether it was hit. These are the outcomes you will hold the person accountable to: on track to hit them is a good performance review; on track to miss two of five is not meeting expectations. You set that standard up front, in the onboarding document.

Only once you have the outcomes do you work out the competencies, the things someone would have to be great at to deliver those results. Sort them through the Competency Stack, which separates the role-specific, level-specific, company-values, company-stage, and team-fit abilities. Competencies are not just how you pressure-test the outcomes. They are how you build the interview guide, because how can you really interview if you do not know what you are interviewing for? Once you know your outcomes and competencies, you know exactly what to test for, and you can design an interview loop that gets real signal on each one. If you want to see what a finished MOC looks like, Andreessen Horowitz published a sample one in their hiring-process walkthrough. [1]

When you write the competencies, be explicit about which strengths are must-haves and which weaknesses you can live with. Everyone you hire will have things that are not perfect, things that will probably bug you a little, because nobody is. If you decide up front what an acceptable weakness looks like, you are far less likely to have someone torpedo the hire at the end, and far more likely to enjoy working with the person, because a weakness you have already accepted is something you roll with instead of something the team relitigates every quarter. The trap runs the other way too. Ben Horowitz, who cofounded Andreessen Horowitz, takes a principle from Colin Powell: hire for strength, not for the lack of weakness. He puts the failure mode sharply:

The group will often find the candidate’s weaknesses, but they won’t place a high enough value on the areas where you need the executive to be a world-class performer. As a result, you hire an executive with no sharp weaknesses, but who is mediocre where you need her to be great. If you don’t have world-class strengths where you need them, you won’t be a world-class company. [3]

So name the strengths the role cannot afford to be mediocre at, and protect them. The MOC is where you write both the must-have strengths and the acceptable weaknesses down.

Write the mission last. Two to four sentences on why the role exists. If you cannot write it clearly, you probably do not understand the role yet.

If this is your first time hiring for the role, do a couple of calibration calls. One of the hard parts of being a founder or an executive is that you constantly have to hire for jobs you have never done yourself. Draft your outcomes and competencies, then show them to a few people who are great at that job, or who have managed people who are, and check three things: whether your outcomes are reasonable, whether you are holding a high enough standard, and whether you have missed a competency that turns out to be critical.

One more key: you do not have to do this with a blank page and a cursor blinking at you. Some people write well that way; plenty do not. It is often far easier to let an AI ask you about the outcomes, grill you on what they really are and what competencies they require, even suggest competencies worth considering. That is an outstanding use of AI, because it gets what is in your head out, especially if you are dictating instead of typing. It is a real power move, and it is exactly what Agent Mode does for the MOC.

The whole reason people organize into companies is that there is a limit to how much one person can get done alone. A huge part of management is getting a group of people to work well together toward outcomes that drive profit and create value for customers. The MOC is relevant to management because it is an outstanding tool for aligning on who you need on the team, what they have to be good at, and what values they have to share at every layer. It is how you make sure you get the right person in the seat.

Get the wrong one and it is expensive in two directions. There is the financial cost: what you spent hiring and training them, plus the opportunity cost of not having someone great there instead. And there is the social cost, which people consistently underrate. It is a drag and a disappointment to bring someone new onto the team and then watch them get let go. It makes people scared of their own jobs, and it makes them lose faith in leadership, because leadership did not make a good call about who to hire in the first place.

There is a bitter irony in all of this. Founders spend a lot of energy frustrated with the people on their teams, when they are the ones who hired them. A role you never defined well becomes a person you blame later. The MOC pushes that accountability back to where it belongs (to you, the hiring manager) and back to when it is still cheap to act on it, before the offer ever goes out.

You are in a meeting with an investor, a peer, your boss, or someone on your team, and somebody says “I think we need to hire a ___.” That is usually the first time the need surfaces, and there is almost always an underlying pain behind it. That is the moment to start writing an MOC. Sometimes you discover there is no role-shaped problem here at all, and the document just saved you a hire you did not need to make.

For a new role, write it before you talk to a single candidate. For a role you have hired many times, you do not start from scratch; you pull up the existing MOC and check what is different this time, an enterprise account executive instead of a mid-market one, a backend engineer instead of devops. Hiring your fiftieth account executive, you should already have a good MOC to sharpen.

No role is too junior, too obvious, or too urgent to skip it. Urgency is the argument for an MOC, not against it. Hire the wrong person under a deadline and now it is even more urgent and even more expensive, because you are further behind than when you started.

“I don’t have time to write an MOC” is one of the worst ways a founder can think about hiring. You do not have time to not write one. Skip it and get the hire wrong, and you spent the time anyway: interviewing, onboarding, paying, and firing the wrong person, then starting the search over. That is far more than the ten hours or so a good MOC takes, a bit more the first time, with calibration calls. Plenty of the people who swear they cannot find the time spent ten hours this week driving to work, watching Netflix, or playing golf. For the one decision that can cost millions and carry enormous upside, ten hours is the easiest trade you will ever make.

The framework comes from Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s Who: The A Method for Hiring. [2] Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Stump and Kristina Graci deLuna wrote a widely read walkthrough, “The Hiring Process,” that shows what building one looks like in practice, and as far as I can tell they are the ones who first compressed mission, outcomes, and competencies into the acronym “MOC.” [1] That is a naming credit, not co-origination; Smart and Street built the thing.

I have adopted the MOC over the years and extended it. I added the Competency Stack to the competencies layer, I pair it with the Calibration Call, and I teach it well past hiring. The same document becomes your onboarding plan, your evaluation and accountability framework through the first 90 days, and your criteria if you ever have to let the person go. If you stop using it right after you finish interviewing, you are cutting yourself short.