Hiring Advisory
Job descriptions that attract the right people, interview loops that actually discriminate, and honest salary benchmarks for your market.
What this covers
Most hiring problems are design problems. A job description written to sound impressive attracts a hundred people who cannot do the job. An interview loop with five rounds of unstructured conversation tires candidates without distinguishing between them. A compensation band set from a two year old benchmark produces a search that was never going to close.
This engagement fixes those before you spend money on sourcing. It is also the cheapest thing we do, and for teams hiring steadily it is often the highest return.
When companies come to us for this
You are hiring repeatedly for a role
Fixing the JD and the loop once pays off across every subsequent hire.
Offers keep getting declined
Usually a compensation or a process problem, and it is worth knowing which before hiring again.
You are building an in-house function
Setting the standard your internal recruiters will work to.
What you get
JD & scorecard
- Written to filter, not to flatter
- Success criteria for year one
- Must-have vs nice-to-have split
- Scorecard interviewers can use
Interview design
- Loop that discriminates
- Structured questions per competency
- Interviewer briefing
- Decision framework
Compensation
- Pune market benchmarks
- Band recommendation by level
- Honest read on whether it will clear
- Equity and variable structuring
Process
- Funnel diagnosis
- Drop-off analysis
- Candidate experience review
- Offer to joining protection
How we actually run it
When a role has been open four months the instinct is to add another agency. Usually that is not the constraint. In our experience it is stuck for one of three reasons, and none of them is solved by more CVs.
The job description describes someone who does not exist. Requirements accumulate. Every stakeholder adds one and nothing is ever removed, until the brief asks for a combination of depth and breadth that perhaps four people in the country have, none of whom will move for what is on offer.
The compensation is off the market. Often by less than people assume, but consistently enough that every good candidate is lost at the same stage. That pattern is visible in the data if anyone looks.
The interview loop is not discriminating. Five rounds that assess roughly the same thing, plus one that assesses nothing, and a decision that comes down to whoever interviewed most confidently. Slow, exhausting for candidates, and it loses the good ones to faster processes. In competitive markets, process speed regularly beats a better offer.
So we start by working out which of the three it is, because the fix is different in each case and doing all three at once is usually unnecessary.
Questions we get asked
Do we have to use you for the search afterwards?
No. Advisory is a standalone engagement and the scorecard and job description are yours to use with any agency or your own internal team.
How current are your salary benchmarks?
They are drawn from live search activity, meaning what candidates in that role, level and location are actually accepting, rather than annual survey data which tends to lag the market it describes.
Can you audit our whole hiring process rather than one role?
Yes. That is a larger engagement covering the roles in your hiring plan, loop design across them, and where your funnel is losing people.
What if the answer is that we should not hire?
We will say so. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the role should be split, that you should hire a level down and develop, or that the work belongs to someone you already employ. That is a better outcome than a search that was never going to work.
Let's talk about the role
Tell us what you are hiring for and we will come back within one working day with a view on the market, a realistic timeline, and whether we are the right firm for it.