Before you talk to a single candidate, write the MOC. MOC stands for mission, outcomes, and competencies, a term coined by Jeff Stump and Kristina Graci deLuna at a16z.¹¹ The Hiring Process Where the term “MOC” comes from. Stump and Graci deLuna’s walkthrough of Smart and Street’s Scorecard framework, with a sample CFO scorecard worth studying. The underlying framework comes from WHO: The A Method for Hiring.²² WHO: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. They built the Scorecard framework; I teach their model extended to cover the MOC’s full lifecycle beyond hiring. Most founders skip straight to posting a job description. That’s backwards. The job description is the external marketing document. The MOC is the internal truth document, and it’s where the real work happens. If you can’t define the role clearly enough to write a MOC, you’re not ready to hire.

What it costs when you skip this

People hire someone, discover the person is missing key competencies, fire them, and then conclude they should have gotten clear on what they wanted before they started.

Think about what that actually costs. Say you’re paying someone $250K and they stay for four years. That’s a million-dollar decision. Now add the time your team spent interviewing, onboarding, and ramping this person. Add the real damage a bad hire can do through poor decisions. Now think about how much work you’d put into buying a million-dollar house: researching neighborhoods, bringing in a home inspector, checking the school districts. You need to put at least that much work into every senior hire. The MOC is how you do it.

Before you write one, calibrate. Talk to one or two people who’ve done this job well at companies you admire. The goal isn’t to copy their job. It’s to learn what great looks like at your stage so you can write a sharper MOC.See: The Calibration Call How to learn what great looks like for a role before you write the MOC.

Mission, outcomes, competencies

1. Mission. Why does this role exist? This should be two to four sentences. If you can’t write it clearly, you don’t understand the role yet.
2. Outcomes. What does this person need to accomplish in the first 12–18 months? Not activities (“manage the sales team”), but results (“grow ARR from $2M to $8M”). Rank them by importance. Three to eight outcomes is the sweet spot.
3. Competencies. What skills and abilities does someone need to deliver those outcomes? Think in three layers: role-specific competencies (unique to this job), level-specific competencies (what’s expected at this seniority), and company-wide competencies (your values, the things every hire should share).See: Competency Layers Three layers of competency go into every hire: role-specific, level-specific, and company-wide.

The fourth dimension: Commitment

Beyond mission, outcomes, and competencies, find out whether the candidate is genuinely excited about three things: your company’s mission, working with their specific manager, and doing this particular role (not what it might turn into). Commitment is a subjective call, but naming it out loud forces the conversation.

The MOC doesn’t end at hiring

It becomes four things:

1. The interview guide. Build a rubric from the MOC: for each competency and outcome, define what excellent, good, fair, and poor look like. Assign each interviewer a piece of the MOC to evaluate so nobody overlaps and nothing gets missed. The interview guide is the document that holds all of it: the rubric, the assignments, and the training your team needs to run the process.See: The Four Gates The full interview process: screening, top-grading, focused interviews, references, rubric, and debrief.
2. The onboarding document. Share the MOC with your new hire on day one. “These are your goals, these are the competencies I’m evaluating you on.” Get their explicit agreement.
3. The evaluation framework. Use it at 30/60/90 days. For each outcome and competency, ask: does this person have a 90% or better chance of delivering? If the answer is no, you need to act. Not wait a year hoping things improve.
4. The firing criteria. If someone isn’t meeting the MOC at 30/60/90, you have clear, documented grounds for the hardest conversation a founder can have.

The MOC is a management document that starts at hiring. One page that tells you who to look for, how to interview them, what to expect in their first year, and when to make the hard call if it’s not working. The founders who put the work in up front don’t just hire better. They onboard faster, evaluate more clearly, and make firing decisions without second-guessing themselves for six months. The ones who skip it spend a year learning what a weekend of focused thinking would have told them.