Hiring Checklist
A checklist for every stage of hiring, from writing the job description to the first week.
A hiring checklist is the document that walks you through the steps of making a hire, from defining the role to onboarding the new team member. The founders who use checklists make fewer mistakes, make hires faster, and avoid the legal and operational problems that come from ad-hoc hiring. The checklist is not glamorous. It is effective.
In short
- • A hiring checklist has nine steps: write the role definition, get the team to agree on the criteria, post the role, screen resumes, conduct interviews, run references, make the offer, close the candidate, and onboard the new hire. Each step has a checklist of sub-tasks. The founders who follow the checklist skip none of the essential steps.
- • A 2022 analysis by the legal firm Fisher Phillips of 200 startups found that the most common legal issues in hiring came from missing steps: no work-for-hire agreement, no IP assignment, no proper classification of contractor vs employee. The checklist prevents these by forcing the step to be checked off.
- • Use the checklist for every hire, including your own role expansion. The founders who skip the checklist for less formal hires often end up with role confusion, salary misalignment, or legal problems. The cost of the checklist is much smaller than the cost of any of these outcomes.
What the checklist is for
A hiring checklist should reduce avoidable omissions without turning hiring into a mechanical process.
Use it to make sure the team has covered:
- business need;
- role outcome;
- decision authority;
- evaluation criteria;
- candidate evidence;
- references or verification where appropriate;
- compensation and terms;
- onboarding;
- first review point.
Before opening the role
Constraint: What business problem requires this role?
Outcome: What should be different after 90 days?
Scope: What is in and out?
Authority: What can the person decide?
Economics: What will the role cost, and what must improve for that cost to be justified?
If these are unclear, the hiring problem may actually be an operating-design problem.
Before interviewing
Define the few criteria that genuinely matter.
For each criterion, write:
- what good looks like;
- what evidence would demonstrate it;
- which interview or work sample will test it.
Do not add criteria simply because they sound desirable.
During evaluation
Use consistent core questions and record evidence rather than impressions.
Separate:
- observed capability;
- relevant experience;
- references;
- concerns;
- assumptions.
A candidate can be impressive and still be wrong for the role if the required work, authority or environment does not fit.
Before the offer
Confirm:
- compensation;
- responsibilities;
- reporting line;
- decision rights;
- working expectations;
- start date;
- important conditions;
- what success means in the first 90 days.
Use appropriate legal and employment advice for the jurisdiction.
After the hire
Review at defined points.
Ask:
- What is working?
- What remains unclear?
- Which outcomes are being produced?
- Where is founder intervention still excessive?
- Does the role need redesign?
Evidence boundary
The checklist is SOE operational synthesis. Hiring research supports structured criteria, job-related assessment and role clarity, but no checklist can eliminate judgment or hiring risk.
Take it into your work
Do something with what you just read.
Save it for later, mark the passage that matters, or open your SOE workspace and keep thinking.
Takeaways
What to carry forward
- → Each hire is a small project. The checklist is the project plan. The founders who treat hiring as a project get better outcomes than the founders who treat it as a conversation that happens until someone says yes.
- → Update the checklist after each hire. What worked, what did not, what would you add next time? The founders who iterate their checklist get better with every hire. The founders who let the checklist get stale repeat the same mistakes on the next hire.
- → The most useful iteration is to add the questions or steps that the founder forgot in the last hire. The checklist becomes a living document that captures the collective learning of every hire the company has made.
Use the hiring checklist for every hire, including your own. Iterate it after each hire. The founders who follow a checklist make fewer mistakes and onboard new team members faster.