What a sporting director actually does
Mostly: absorbs the decisions that would otherwise be taken by whoever is angriest on a Sunday night.
The job description says squad planning, recruitment strategy, alignment between academy and first team, manager appointment. All accurate, and all of it downstream of the actual function, which is to be the single point where football decisions stop being taken emotionally and start being taken against criteria agreed when nobody was upset.
That is why the role fails so often. It is given the responsibility and not the decision rights, so the first time a president overrules it in a window, everybody in the building learns what the structure really is, and the sporting director spends the remaining eighteen months managing a fiction.
If you are appointing one, the useful preparation is not the shortlist. It is writing down, before anybody is interviewed, which decisions that person will take alone — and then checking whether the owner can actually live with the list. If the answer is no, appoint a head of recruitment instead and save everybody two years.
Writing
Your recruitment problem is a structure problem
Clubs call about scouting. The finding is nearly always that three people each think they have the final say and it has never been written down.
Academy productivity: the only metric that matters
Not how many turn professional somewhere. The share of your own first team's minutes played by players you trained.