Five Requirements in a CoS Job Description That Tell Me You Have No Idea What You're Doing

I read a lot of Chief of Staff job descriptions. Not by choice. The way some people are pulled into watching a slow-motion car crash on the highway, I am pulled into LinkedIn job postings.

And almost every one of them is, in some way, telling on itself. (And often feels like I’m reading the equivalent of a slow-motion car crash on the highway.)

The job description is the X-ray. Before a single resume comes in, before a single interview gets scheduled, before someone’s spouse is asked to relocate, the JD has already told me whether the role is going to work. Most of the time, it won’t. How do I know?

Here are the top five tells. If your draft contains any of them, the problem isn’t your candidate pool. The problem is upstream of your candidate pool.

1. “Chief Vibe Officer.” “Right Hand to the CEO.” “Head of Special Projects.”
If you can’t say the words “Chief of Staff,” you are not hiring one.

There is a category of job posting where the title has been carefully, lovingly, deliberately constructed to be Anything Other Than Chief of Staff. Sometimes it’s aspirational—Chief Vibe Officer, Chief of Awesome, Head of Magic, Chief Unicorn. Sometimes it’s evasive like Right Hand to the CEO, Strategic Partner to the Founder, Special Projects Lead. Sometimes it’s the corporate fan-fiction version of CoS, like Director of Strategy & Operations, VP of the Office of the CEO, Business Operations Generalist.

All of these are the same job. Or rather, all of these are the same attempt to dress up the same job in Lululemon and call it a day.  And the athleisure wear is always covering one of two things.

Door Number One: you think “Chief of Staff” sounds too corporate, too political, too suit-and-tie for your culture, and you’ve decided that calling someone Chief Vibe Officer will fix that. Guess what? It will not.

The vibe in question is going to be “the person who absorbs all incoming chaos so the founder doesn’t have to,” and there is no amount of branding that makes that vibe fun. You are going to hire a person, give them a cute title, and watch their LinkedIn quietly update to “Chief of Staff” within four months because the recruiters calling them have no idea what a Chief Vibe Officer does.

Door Number Two (which is worse):

you know exactly what a Chief of Staff is, you know what one costs, and you are calling it something else so you don’t have to pay for it. “Right Hand to the CEO” pays $95K. “Chief of Staff” pays $180K. Same job. Different title. You are not being clever. You are being cheap, and the candidate market knows.

This is, structurally, the moment in Game of Thrones where everyone agrees Tyrion is the Hand of the King in everything but name and then refuses to call him that, and somehow this is supposed to fool the other lords. It does not fool the other lords. It does not fool anyone.

If your title was workshopped at an offsite, the role was not designed at all. It was branded.

2. “Ivy League preferred.”
You’re not designing a role. You’re casting a James Cameron movie.

Picture the JD. The Ivy League line is always in there with the same casual confidence as “snacks provided.” As if it costs nothing. As if no one will notice.

I went to Penn. I can say this with the authority of someone whose own degree is on the list. I have also worked in the West Wing, helped stand up a federal agency, and run a Chief of Staff function at the Gates Foundation. None of that work was made possible by the diploma. The diploma got me in some rooms. The work kept me in them.

So when I see “Ivy League preferred” in a JD, I am not bristling on behalf of someone else. I am telling you, from inside the tent, that I have sat across from CEOs who said it and meant, with their full chest, “I want someone whose pedigree makes me feel safe in a room I find intimidating.”

Which is not a hiring requirement. That is a personal therapy goal.

Pedigree is what you reach for when you don’t know what you’re looking for. The minute you can describe the actual judgment you need, the school stops mattering.

3. “MBA and Big Four required.”
Hard to believe, I know, but consultants don’t necessarily make for the best Chiefs.

This one is a tell because it tells me what you think the work is.

You think the work is decks. You think the work is a 47-tab model with an executive summary on the front page in 11-point Calibri. You think the work is sitting in a conference room called “Summit” and producing a recommendation that ends with “options for further consideration.”

That is not what the work is.

The work is walking into your CEO’s office at 4:47pm on a Thursday and telling them their head of product just resigned over Slack and the all-hands is in fourteen minutes. The work is knowing that the VP of engineering is having an affair with a board member and that this fact is structurally relevant to the strategy conversation you are about to have. The work is, on a regular basis, being the only person in the room who will say “This is going to make us look stupid,” and not be fired for it.

None of that is on the curriculum at Wharton. None of it is on the partner track at KPMG. I have nothing against people with MBAs and Big Four backgrounds. Some of them make excellent Chiefs of Staff. They make excellent Chiefs of Staff in spite of those credentials, not because of them.

If your JD describes a consulting engagement, you don’t want a Chief of Staff. You want a sixteen-week SOW and a thank-you bottle of wine at the end.

4. “Candidate should be familiar with [insert your P&L here].”
Almost. So close. Three feet from the hole.

This one crushes my soul (what’s left of it), because the instinct is right. You’re thinking: my Chief of Staff needs to understand the business. Yes. Correct. Gold star.

Now, zoom out. What’s actually in the JD?

It says “SaaS P&L experience.” Or “biotech P&L experience.” Or “budgeting and fluency with Excel.” (Because who needs a COO when you have a catch-all Chief of Staff and a hiring manager who doesn’t know about Claude in Excel?) Or, my personal favorite, “must have worked in a Series B-to-C transition with strong familiarity with our specific revenue model.” Which is to say, you are screening for someone who has already done your exact job, in your exact industry, at your exact stage, with your exact gross margin profile.

That person does not exist. And if they do exist, they are running a competitor’s business. Breaking News (that really shouldn’t be): They are not coming to work for you.

Worse, you have just filtered out everyone who could have actually helped. The person who ran a CoS function in healthcare and would bring you a regulatory instinct you don’t have. The person who came up in a federal agency and knows how to navigate a board with conflicting agendas (because, you know, Congress). The person who scaled a nonprofit through a leadership transition and knows what burnout looks like at month nine.

Industry fluency is learnable. Judgment is not. You are optimizing for the wrong variable, and Indiana Jones already told you what happens when you optimize for the wrong variable. You choose poorly.

A Chief of Staff who understands your industry but not your leader will fail. A Chief of Staff who understands your leader but not your industry will be fluent in your industry by the end of the second quarter.

5. “Prepares briefing materials, talking points, and meeting agendas.”
Reader, this is the executive assistant job description.

I want to be careful here, because executive assistants are a force of nature and I would not last a week without the exceptional ones. The role is essential when held by someone who has the experience and depth of knowledge to be a true partner and goalie for an executive. The role is also not the same role as Chief of Staff. They are different jobs. They require different things. They sit in different parts of the org chart. They are paid differently for a reason.

And yet.

In roughly half the JDs I read, the bullets describing the work are functionally indistinguishable from an EA posting. Prepare briefing materials. Manage the CEO’s schedule. Take notes in leadership meetings. Coordinate logistics for the board offsite. These are real tasks. They are not Chief of Staff tasks. They are the tasks a Chief of Staff inherits when no one has thought through what a Chief of Staff is actually for.

And then—and this is the part where I close the laptop and go for a walk—the JD ends with a salary band of $180,000 plus equity. You are paying Chief of Staff money for an executive assistant role and then you are going to be very surprised, in month four, that the person you hired is unhappy. They are unhappy because you described one job and hired for another and now they are doing both, badly, because no one can do both well.

This is the moment in The Devil Wears Prada where Andy realizes the job she was promised and the job she’s doing are not the same job. Except in your version, Miranda Priestly is also confused about what the job is, and there is no one in the building to tell her.

If your CoS bullets read like an EA listing, your CoS will quit. Or worse, they’ll stay, and your real Chief of Staff work will stay undone forever.

So what do you actually do?

Every one of these tells points to the same underlying problem: the JD got written before the role was designed. Someone Googled “Chief of Staff job description template,” pasted it into a Word doc, added “AI” and “Ivy League preferred,” and posted it before lunch.

That is not a hiring strategy. That is what The West Wing called “let Bartlet be Bartlet” in reverse. You are letting the template be the template, instead of letting the role be the role.

The fix isn’t a better template. The fix is the work that should happen before the template. What is the actual function this person is being hired to perform? What does your operating environment look like, honestly, from the inside? What are you asking this person to do that you cannot, or will not, do yourself? What authority will they actually carry, versus the authority you’ll claim to give them in the offer letter and quietly retract by week three?

Those are not questions you answer in a job description. Those are questions you answer before you write one.

One more thing.

Everything above is about the hiring side and how the role gets broken on the way in. But there’s a second half to this problem, which is the candidate side. How do you actually know whether someone has the wiring to do this job well?

Most CoS “assessments” on the market are a personality quiz with a foil sticker. You answer twelve questions, you get a four-color report, you put it on LinkedIn. It is, structurally, the same instrument as a BuzzFeed quiz that tells you which character from Grey’s Anatomy you are. Fun. Not rigorous.

The Coul & Gold CoS Readiness Assessment is not that. It is an honest, mature, structured instrument built on a diagnostic methodology. The questions don’t have obvious answers. They surface real tensions in the role—the moments where two of your stated principles will be in direct conflict and you have to choose—and they measure how you actually handle them. It is not designed to make you feel good. It is designed to tell you the truth and help you with any skills gaps you might have.

If you’re a CEO trying to evaluate a finalist, this is the instrument.

If you’re a Chief of Staff trying to assess your own readiness for a bigger role, this is the instrument.

It is not a certificate that pretends to give you all the tools you need to do the CoS job. It is a mirror, and it reflects whether you’re wired for this job. Because you need a certain wiring to do this well. And the wiring doesn’t have to come from Harvard’s Bookstore.

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Either way, you’re in the right room. Thanks for being here.

See you in two weeks,
Rachael