You Can't Delegate Hiring Until You Document It
Your hiring process is "I know it when I see it."
That's not a process. That's a bottleneck with your name on it.
Every time you hand recruiting to a manager or office person, it falls apart. They bring in candidates you'd never hire. You get pulled back in to review everything. Nothing changes. You're frustrated, they're confused, and you're convinced nobody can do this but you.
Wrong. What lives in your head can't be delegated. It has to be written down first.
The "I Know It When I See It" Problem
You've seen enough people succeed and fail that pattern recognition feels obvious to you.
It isn't obvious to anyone else.
Your manager doesn't know that someone who shows up five minutes late to the interview is out. They don't know you won't hire anyone with three jobs in 18 months without a good explanation. They don't know the right answer to "why do you want this job" is something specific about money or schedule, not "I love helping people."
Those filters are in your head. The moment you hand hiring off, those filters disappear. You get candidates who passed someone else's gut check, not yours.
What to Document (And It's Not a Novel)
You don't need a 40-page manual. You need three things on one page:
(a) Non-negotiables → the things a candidate must have to move forward. Not preferences. Requirements. If they don't have a valid driver's license and your role requires driving, that's a hard stop. Write it down.
(b) Automatic disqualifiers → the red flags that end the conversation no matter how good the rest looks. Late to interview, job-hopped every six months, can't explain gaps, badmouthed every previous employer. List them.
(c) Standard interview questions → the five to seven questions you ask every candidate, with notes on what good versus bad answers sound like. Not a script. Just clarity on what you're listening for.
One page. Full stop.
A manager with that document can screen candidates against your actual standards, not their own.
The Consistency Problem Nobody Talks About
Here's what happens without documentation: your decisions are based partly on the candidate and partly on what kind of day you're having.
Exhausted and behind on Monday morning? You're too lenient or too harsh depending on how desperate you are. Good Thursday after a strong week? Your judgment is probably calibrated.
Inconsistency costs you two ways. (a) You hire people you shouldn't when you're desperate. (b) You reject people you should have hired when you're in a bad spot. Both are expensive.
Documentation creates a standard that doesn't fluctuate with your mood. The criteria are the criteria. Manager applies them. You review whoever clears the bar.
How to Build It Without Making It a Project
Start with your most common position. The role you hire for most, the one you know best.
Write down the five things that make or break that hire. Not twenty. Five. Spend 20 minutes.
Then write down three to five questions you always want asked. Think about what you were trying to figure out the last time you made a great hire. What did they say that told you they were right? Write that question down.
Give that one-pager to whoever is helping you hire and run two or three candidates through it. See where it breaks. Where did it fail to capture something important? Where was it too vague?
Refine after each hire for the first three rounds. By hire four, you'll have something solid enough to get out of the process until the final conversation.
What Delegation Actually Looks Like
The goal isn't to disappear from hiring completely. The goal is to only be involved where your judgment genuinely adds something.
With a documented process, someone else handles: posting, initial screening against your criteria, first-round calls or video interviews. They bring you candidates who already cleared the bar.
You handle: final interviews with the top two or three. The offer conversation. The decision.
That's 90 minutes per hire instead of 6-8 hours. For a role you hire three or four times a year, that's 20-25 hours back. Do the math on what an hour of your time is worth.
The process has to exist outside your head before it can run without you.
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- [How to Train Your First Recruiter](/guides/how-to-train-your-first-recruiter/)
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