Designs an end-to-end hiring pipeline from job requisition through debrief and offer, with stage-by-stage conversion benchmarks, a reverse-funnel capacity plan, and time-to-fill targets. Use when someone asks "design our hiring process", "how many candidates do we need to make one hire", "our offers keep getting declined", "candidates are dropping out of our funnel", or "how long should hiring take". Do NOT use for writing the interview questions and rubrics for one loop - use interview-guide-builder instead - for writing the sourcing messages to candidates - use candidate-outreach-personalizer instead - for the scorecard artifact itself - use hiring-scorecard instead - or for the job post copy - use job-description-writer instead.
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name: Hiring Pipeline
description: Designs an end-to-end hiring pipeline from job requisition through debrief and offer, with stage-by-stage conversion benchmarks, a reverse-funnel capacity plan, and time-to-fill targets. Use when someone asks "design our hiring process", "how many candidates do we need to make one hire", "our offers keep getting declined", "candidates are dropping out of our funnel", or "how long should hiring take". Do NOT use for writing the interview questions and rubrics for one loop - use interview-guide-builder instead - for writing the sourcing messages to candidates - use candidate-outreach-personalizer instead - for the scorecard artifact itself - use hiring-scorecard instead - or for the job post copy - use job-description-writer instead.
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# Hiring Pipeline
An unstructured hiring process produces slow decisions, biased ones, and lost candidates - the top candidate accepts elsewhere during week three of a meandering loop. A structured pipeline reduces bias, compresses time-to-hire, and gives every candidate a consistent experience; the reverse funnel below also tells you, before you open the role, whether the top of the funnel is big enough to produce a hire at all.
## Operating procedure
The order is load-bearing: the scorecard (Step 1) must exist before sourcing, because every later stage evaluates against it, and interviewers cannot own attributes that were never defined.
### Step 1: Write the requisition and scorecard
Collect from the hiring manager before anything opens:
- Mission of the role - what success looks like in 6-12 months, one paragraph.
- Must-have vs nice-to-have skills - keep must-haves to 3-5. Long lists deter great candidates, especially from underrepresented groups.
- Scorecard - the 4-6 attributes every interviewer will evaluate against, with what "strong" looks like for each. This is the backbone of an unbiased loop; pair with hiring-scorecard to build it.
- Comp band and level - agreed before sourcing, never negotiated ad hoc mid-process.
- Target start date - this sets the time-to-fill clock.
### Step 2: Plan the funnel backward from one hire
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