Before you post the job ad, map the job. Write down the actual loop the new hire would run all day: where the input comes from, what decision gets made, where the output goes. If you can describe the loop in a paragraph, there is a real chance you are about to pay a salary for a pipeline.

Hire humans for human work

This is not an argument against hiring. It is an argument for hiring humans to do human work (judgment, taste, relationships, the exceptions) and letting the machine run the loop. One of our retail clients returned twenty-two hours a week to their team this way without a single role disappearing; the roles just got interesting. That reclaimed time is the flip side of paying down automation debt.

The month-six test

The test we use internally: would a sharp person doing this job for six months learn anything in month six they did not know in month one? If the answer is no, the job is a loop wearing a lanyard. Automate the loop with one of our pipeline products, and spend the salary on someone whose month six looks nothing like their month one. The cruel irony is that the jobs easiest to fill are usually the easiest to automate, the same reason we ship daily and let the results argue for themselves.