A useful hiring brief explains what the person will own, which evidence would demonstrate fit, and which constraints are real. Use this template to align founders, hiring managers, and recruiting partners before candidate introductions begin.
This is a working template. The search lesson is drawn from an anonymized Refery engagement; the separately labeled sample brief is fictional.
What a Refery search taught us about the brief
A recruiting partner flagged that one full-stack brief combined product work with deeper specialist work overlapping another open engineering seat. Refery asked the founder whether the product role could be considered separately. The founder agreed that a more conventional full-stack profile could work, and Refery relayed the decision back to the partner.
That is why this template asks about responsibilities and boundaries, not only skills. A requirement can describe work the company needs without being work this particular hire must own.
The practical question is: which responsibility belongs in this seat, and which already has another owner? Read the anonymized account of the brief change. The fictional example below remains separate from that client story.
Copy this brief
- Company and stage: What are you building, for whom, and what has already been demonstrated?
- Role and decision owner: Who is hiring, and who makes the final decision?
- Reason for the hire: Which business problem needs this person?
- First outcomes: What should exist or work differently after the person joins?
- Current starting point: What team, product, customers, and support are already in place?
- Essential evidence: Which prior work would demonstrate the capabilities you need?
- Helpful but optional experience: Which skills can be learned after joining?
- Constraints: Location, on-site expectations, travel, availability, approved budget, and other genuine requirements.
- Responsibilities and boundaries: What does this person own, and what stays with the founders or another team?
- Interview plan: Stages, evaluators, evidence to collect, and decision process.
- Candidate proposition: Why might a suitable person choose this role?
- Open questions: Which assumptions should the search help test?
Example: an early-stage AI engineering hire
Reason: A working prototype needs a repeatable customer deployment process.
First outcomes: Establish an evaluation set using approved data; ship a monitored integration; document the next deployment.
Essential evidence: Personally implemented an integration, investigated failures, and explained technical tradeoffs to a customer or internal user.
Optional: Experience with the exact model provider or orchestration framework currently in use.
Boundaries: The founder owns customer commitments and prioritization. The engineer owns implementation choices within agreed constraints.
Open question: Is most of the job reusable product engineering or hands-on work in separate customer environments? Resolve this before choosing between a founding engineer and an FDE profile.
Turn requirements into interview questions
| Requirement | Evidence question |
|---|---|
| Owns delivery | What did you personally ship, and what happened after launch? |
| Handles ambiguity | Which assumption did you test first, and why? |
| Works with customers | How did customer feedback change your implementation or sales approach? |
| Makes tradeoffs | Which option did you reject, and what did that cost? |
| Collaborates well | Describe a disagreement and how the decision was made. |
Ask the same core questions across candidates and capture evidence before discussing overall impressions. Adapt the details to the job rather than using an identical technical exercise for every role.
Use the brief throughout the search
Before circulating the brief, decide what information the recruiter can share with candidates. Use the guide to briefing a recruiter without sharing confidential information to separate approved role context from restricted company material.
After the first introductions, compare the actual candidate evidence with the original requirements. If you change the brief, record what changed and why. This keeps feedback useful and prevents the hiring bar from drifting with each new profile.
For more detail, use the founding engineer guide, FDE scorecard, or first GTM hire guide.
Share your brief with Refery. A job description or a short explanation of the role is enough to begin the conversation.