The Free Hiring Kickoff Document

(The One Doc Behind Good Hires)

If you've ever opened a role, briefed a recruiter, and watched the pipeline fill up with candidates who weren't quite right, this is for you. Free to download, free to share with your team.

Why we built this

We've spent 7 years running technical searches for US companies hiring across Latin America and Portugal. Hundreds of roles, every seniority, every stack.

Here's what we learned the hard way: the searches that go sideways almost never go sideways during sourcing or interviews. They go sideways in the first 30 minutes, when the role gets briefed.

The hiring manager has one picture in their head, the recruiter writes down another, and nobody notices until week three when the shortlist lands and half of it gets rejected for reasons that were never on the brief.

So we built a kickoff doc that forces the conversation to happen up front. Eight questions, four sections, no fluff. If you can't answer them, you're not ready to open the role. If you can, your recruiter has everything they need to go find the right person on the first pass.

We use it on every search we run. Now it's yours.

What's inside:

Four sections. Eight questions. Roughly 30 minutes to fill out with your hiring manager:

  • Job Details — title, seniority, salary band, timezone, start date, and who owns the hire
  • Business Problem — why the role exists, what the person does day to day, what they deliver in their first 90 days, and who they sit next to
  • Ideal Candidate Profile — required vs nice to have skills, why this job is worth leaving another one for, and where someone great goes from here
  • Candidate Pipeline — the full interview loop, example profiles, source companies, and the angles your recruiter should pull on
role kickoff document

A good kickoff is the cheapest thing you can do to fix your hiring. Half an hour with the right questions in front of you will save you weeks of misaligned interviews and a shortlist nobody's excited about.

Take the doc. Run your next kickoff with it. See what changes.

If you ever need help finding developers, we have more than 15k candidates in our database, and we'd be happy to help.

You can book a free diagnosis call with us here: https://cal.com/miguel-marques/intro