The 8-Question Pre-Hire Readiness Scorecard
For founder-led consulting, fractional, and learning-agency firms who have decided a senior hire is the next move, or are about to decide.
Hiring readiness is not the same as hiring intent. The role can feel urgent while still lacking the decision charter, authority boundaries, and documented rules needed for a clean transition.
The scorecard asks eight direct questions across decision clarity, written standards, onboarding capacity, and 90-day outcomes. The pattern of yeses, partials, and nos points to the next highest-leverage step.
Answer each question honestly: yes, partial, or no. There is no right score. There is only what your answers signal about whether to hire now, write the spec further, or do one more workflow pass first.
- 01
Can you name the decision the hire will own, in one sentence, without using the word “support”?
“Owns pricing decisions up to $50k without my sign-off.” That’s a decision. “Supports the founder on pricing” isn’t. If the role description leans on “support,” “help with,” or “take some off your plate,” the role isn’t yet a role. It’s a wish.
- 02
Have you written down the rule the hire will apply, in a doc someone else could read?
The pricing band, the quality bar, the scope-change protocol, whichever decision they’re inheriting. If the rule lives only in your head, the hire will either ask you (you remain the bottleneck) or guess (you overrule and morale erodes). One page is enough. Zero pages is the failure mode.
- 03
Could a peer in your network read the role-spec and tell you the title within five seconds?
“Director of Delivery for a fractional CMO firm, owning quality review and capacity planning across 6 senior consultants.” That’s a title. “Senior generalist who’ll figure it out with me” isn’t. If the spec is compound (delivery + sales + ops + culture), you’re hiring three roles into one salary, and capable people read that as confusion.
- 04
Have you priced what the hire would cost in their first 12 months, including ramp and your time?
Base, all-in comp, search cost, first-year ramp at full pay against partial output, your hours during onboarding. If the answer is just the base salary, the cost is undercounted by half or more. The decision to hire should be made against the real number, not the headline number.
- 05
Is there a stretch of 30 days in the next quarter where you could clear 10 hours a week to onboard the person?
Not “I’ll find time.” Specific block, on the calendar, today. Senior hires need real onboarding ramp from the founder in the first 90 days, especially in firms where the operating logic still lives in the founder’s head. If the time isn’t carveable, the hire’s first quarter is the founder being too busy to transfer the thing the hire was brought in to absorb.
- 06
Can you name the metric that will tell you, in 90 days, whether the hire is working?
Pricing turnaround time. Number of proposals shipped without your sign-off. Quality-review cycles that closed at the senior team rather than your inbox. Concrete, observable, founder-independent. “How it feels” is not a 90-day metric. If you can’t name the metric, you can’t tell whether the hire is sticking or whether you’ve just absorbed them into the bottleneck.
- 07
Have you decided what authority the hire actually gets on day one, in writing?
Spending limit. Decisions they can make without checking. Decisions that still come to you. The version most firms run, “we’ll figure it out as we go,” is the one that produces the cc-the-founder pattern by week three. Authority that isn’t written gets defaulted to “ask the founder”, the safer option for a new person.
- 08
If the hire stayed in the role for two years and did exactly what you wrote down, would the firm be visibly different?
If the answer is “not really, but my workload would be lower,” the role might still be useful, but it isn’t strategic, and it should be priced and scoped accordingly. If the answer is “yes, here’s the specific thing the firm could do that it can’t do today,” that’s a strategic hire, the comp band, the autonomy, and the search bar all need to reflect that.
Answer all 8 to see your interpretation.
Keep reading
This scorecard pairs with the full write-up, the 8-question pre-hire readiness scorecard. For more on getting the role right before you hire, see Altvina Insights.