Hiring Playbooks

Step-by-step guides for the moments that matter most in building a team. Whether you're writing your first job brief or closing a hard-to-fill role, these playbooks give you a clear path — without the HR jargon.

• What Can a Previous Employer Say in a Reference? A UK Request, Graded — Acas leaves the detail to the referee, the Equality Act fences off health, and the ICO wants the whole process declared up front. We grade a typical UK reference request and rebuild it.
• Fake Job Candidates: A Calm Guide to Verifying Who You Are Interviewing — Gartner projects that up to one in four candidate profiles may be fabricated by 2028, and 6% of job seekers surveyed admitted to interview fraud. One live check, applied to everybody, covers most of the risk.
• How to Reject a Candidate After an Interview: One Email, Taken Apart — A composite rejection email scores four out of ten against five tests. Here is where the other six points went, with the rewrite that earns them back.
• Ask a Headhunter: Should I Ever Hire My Friend? — Hiring a friend can work - but this scenario scores just 3 out of 10. Here is how to run the scorecard before it costs you both the role and the relationship.
• How Do You Identify the Founding Hire? — The founding hire isn't just your first key person — it's the decision that sets the chain for everything that follows. Get the role definition wrong, and the sourcing, vetting, and first ninety days all reflect that. Here's how to get the sequence right.
• The Employee Referral Premium: Why Referred Hires Stay, and How to Keep It — A study of nine large employers found referred workers were substantially less likely to quit, with the advantage coming from lower turnover and cheaper recruiting. The mechanism is information, and it is easy to break.
• Candidate Communication: How First-Time Hirers Stop Losing People to Silence — Poor communication, not pay, was the top reason candidates abandoned applications in one 2024 survey. The remedy is a date and the discipline to honour it.
• Frontend, Backend, Full Stack: What Recruiters Need to Know —
• How to Build a Repeatable Hiring Process That Actually Scales — Building a repeatable hiring process means every new role benefits from what you learned the last time - here's how to create one that actually scales.
• Tech Roles Decoded: A Recruiter's Plain-English Guide — A practical guide to help talent acquisition recruiters explain tech roles clearly, ask better questions, and screen more confidently without needing to understand the code.
• Why CEOs Call Me After a Bad Hire, Never Before — The real cost of a bad hire goes far beyond salary and severance - here's what it actually takes from your team, your clients, and your time.
• The nuances of hiring at each stage — what changes between the 5th employee and the 22nd to 25th — The nuances of hiring at each stage reveal a genuine shift in mechanics, stakes, and failure modes as you move from your fifth employee to your twenty-fifth.