Hiring Broken? You’re Confusing Roles with Professions. (An Enterprise Architect’s View)

Very often, a JD reads like: "Enterprise Architect needed. Must have: 15 years of experience, architecture, strategy, Java coding skills, and ‘design thinking’."

Why do companies produce such confused and mismatched requirements for pivotal roles?

I analysed the hiring supply chain. The root cause isn't "bad HR." It’s an ontological error in how we define roles and candidates.

Here is the mechanism:

1. The Role comes first. It is created inside a firm through the division of labour. A specific operation is decoupled into a dedicated role for better productivity. It is highly contextual.

2. The Profession follows. When that employee leaves, they package that specific internal experience and skills into a portable product. They bring it to the market as a "Profession."

The Gap.

For simple jobs (Cashier): The internal Role and the person's profession are identical. A CV maps 1:1 to a JD. No translation needed.

For complex jobs (Architect): The gap is massive. The Role is defined by the company context (stakeholders, operation model, strategy, platform). The Profession is defined by prior skills and experience, and abstractions (TOGAF, Cloud, AI).

The Failure Mode: Companies write JDs that describe an abstract Profession or abstract skills and experience when they actually need to fill a Role (tasks, goals, OKRs, and KPIs).

For simple roles, a list of skills makes sense.

For a complex role that requires talent and new solutions, that list is a constraint.

Candidates send CVs listing their Profession (personal capabilities).

The two ships pass in the night or return to the old port.

The Solution: For complex roles, the Cover Letter is not a formality; it is the integration layer. It is the only place where the candidate can and must map their abstract Profession to the company’s Role described in the job description.

If you are hiring for complexity but treating the process like a commodity transaction (CV-only, AI-filtered), you aren't hiring talent.

You’re just matching keywords to a task and goals you haven't defined.

Let’s stop hiring Architects like we hire Cashiers.