The 8-Question Pre-Hire Readiness Scorecard

The eight gates a founder-led firm should pass before posting the role, and how to read the score before deciding whether to launch the search this week or take two more weeks to sharpen the spec.

You've decided the hire is the right next move. You've sat with the cost. You're somewhere between "writing the job description this week" and "starting the search this month."

Pause for fifteen minutes. Run the eight questions below. If the score is clean, post the role and run the search with confidence. If the score isn't clean, the next two to four weeks of work isn't the search. It's the spec, and that work is what determines whether the hire sticks.

Founders of service firms often know they should hire. The harder question, the one that decides whether the hire actually works, is whether the role and the firm are ready for the person.

Why running the search without this gate usually fails

The instinct, when the hire decision feels overdue, is to move. Write the job description, ping the recruiter, post on the network. Each step is a reasonable response to the pressure. A common outcome is that the role is written compound (delivery + sales + ops in one paragraph), the firm hasn't documented the rules the hire would inherit, the founder hasn't carved the ramp time, and by month four, the hire is either kicking decisions back to the founder or making calls the founder would have made differently.

The reason this happens tends to be the same across these firms. The hire decision and the readiness check get collapsed into one act. They're two different acts, and the readiness check almost never gets done because once a founder has decided to hire, the search feels like the only thing that needs to happen next.

The corollary, from yesterday's post, is that the cost of hiring into an unready firm is meaningfully higher than the cost of pausing to sharpen the spec. The scorecard below is the gate that separates those two outcomes.

The 8 dimensions of pre-hire readiness

These are the eight gates a founder-led firm should pass before posting the role. Not nice-to-haves. Each is a structural readiness check, and each maps to a specific failure mode if it's missing.

1. The decision is named in one sentence

Can you name the decision the hire will own, in one sentence, without leaning on 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, and capable people read wishes as confusion.

Test: write the sentence. If you find yourself reaching for the word "support," the spec needs another pass.

2. The rule is written down

Have you written 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 is being inherited. If the rule lives in your head, the hire will either ask you (you remain the bottleneck) or guess (you overrule, morale erodes). One page is enough. Zero pages is the failure mode.

Test: a peer should be able to read the doc and tell you, without your help, what the hire is going to do when X happens.

3. The title would land in five seconds

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 the comp band you're prepared to pay won't attract the senior version of any of those three.

Test: send the spec to two peer founders. If they come back with two different titles, the spec is compound.

4. The first-12-months cost is priced

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.

Test: produce four numbers. Comp all-in. Search cost. Ramp cost. Founder hours, fully loaded. Sum them. That's what the hire actually costs in year one.

5. The 30-day onboarding block is on the calendar

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.

Test: open the calendar. Block the hours now, in pencil if needed. If the calendar can't take it, the hire shouldn't be posted yet.

6. The 90-day metric exists

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 reviews 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 pattern.

Test: write the metric in one line. If you can't, the role's success isn't yet defined, and a hire against an undefined success criterion gets evaluated by founder mood rather than founder data.

7. The day-one authority is in writing

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," because that's the safer option for the new person.

Test: produce a one-page authority doc. Spending threshold. Decision rights. Escalation triggers. If the doc doesn't exist, the founder is the de facto authority on everything by default, regardless of what the org chart says.

8. The two-year outcome is named

If the hire stayed in the role for two years and did exactly what's in the spec, 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 firm-level outcome that would emerge," that's a strategic hire, and the comp band, autonomy, and search bar all need to reflect that.

Test: write one sentence. In two years, this hire allows the firm to do X that it cannot do today. If the sentence comes out clean, the hire is strategic. If it comes out as "I'd be less busy," the hire is operational. Both can be right answers, but the spec, comp, and search bar are different.

Reading the score

Run the eight against your firm honestly. Count yeses, partials, and nos.

6 to 8 yeses. The role is hireable today. The spec is concrete enough for a recruiter or peer-network referral to run, the firm is documented enough for the hire to land on a real surface, and the 90-day metric is in place. Run the search. If you scored 8, you're approaching this hire with substantially more discipline than is typical, and the hire is significantly more likely to be in the role two years from now.

3 to 5 yeses. This is where founder-led firms commonly land when they get serious about a hire. The role has shape. Some of the rules exist. The gaps are usually concentrated in two or three of the eight, often metric (Q6), authority (Q7), and ramp time (Q5). The hire could work, but the failure rate at this readiness level is, in our view, high enough that a two-week sharpen-the-spec pass before posting is the highest-leverage thing the founder will do this quarter.

0 to 2 yeses. The role isn't ready to post. The hire would land into a firm that hasn't yet articulated what it wants from them, and the failure mode is the one we'll cover Friday: the senior person inherits a workflow only the founder can run. The next move is two to four weeks of role-spec and decision-rule writing, before any search begins. A peer founder, an operator outside the firm, or a fixed-scope engagement like the Blueprint can pressure-test the spec, which matters more than founders usually realize because the spec is being judged from inside the firm by the person who built the bottleneck pattern in the first place.

The number of yeses tells the founder how ready the firm is. The identity of the noes tells them what to fix. A no on Q2 (rule isn't written) is a 1 to 2 week documentation sprint. A no on Q8 (two-year outcome unclear) is a positioning question that may take longer to resolve. The right next move is different for each.

Closing

Tomorrow we'll walk through what a written role-spec actually contains before the job goes live, the artifact that turns the eight yeses into a document a recruiter, a peer, and the hire themselves can all read.

The scorecard is the gate. The role-spec is what passes through it.

The gap between "I think we need to hire" and "the role is named, the rule is written, the metric exists, the calendar is blocked, and the authority is documented" is the difference between a hire that's a coin flip and one that's set up to stick.

Continue the series

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on the Pre-Hire Readiness series. The full arc:

• Monday: When the Symptoms Point at Hiring (and When They Don't)
• Tuesday: What It Costs to Hire Into the Wrong Gap
• Wednesday: The 8-Question Pre-Hire Readiness Scorecard (this post)
• Thursday: What a Written Role-Spec Actually Contains Before You Post the Job
• Friday: Why "I'll Just Clone Myself" Is the Most Expensive Hire Framing in Fractional Firms

Run the diagnostic

Eight questions, fifteen minutes, before any job description goes live.

Content and Accuracy Disclaimer

This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Altvina team. We rigorously fact-check our content; if you notice an inaccuracy, please contact us so we can correct it.