A search playbook is the thing most hiring fails to write down. The role lives in someone's head, slightly differently in each head, and the search proceeds anyway. Candidates arrive. Opinions form. The criteria drift to match whoever interviewed well. Nobody can say, six weeks in, whether the search is on track, because there was never a track.
Our twenty-two point playbook exists to refuse that drift. It is a document built before sourcing begins, and it has two halves: what we collect from you, and what we calibrate from the market. The number is less important than the discipline. The point is that the search is specified before it starts.
What follows is not the list. It is the shape of the list, and the reason each part of it earns its place.
What we collect from the hiring team
The first half comes from you, and most of it is harder to answer than it looks. We start with what the role must accomplish in its first four quarters. We want the outcomes, not the responsibilities. A responsibility is a thing you do. An outcome is a thing that is true a year from now because the right person was here. Founders who can name the outcomes have already half-defined the candidate.
Then we map who the role works with. Who it reports to, who reports to it, and the harder question: who it has to win over without any authority at all. Most roles fail at that third relationship, and most job descriptions never mention it.
And we ask what failure looks like. Concretely. Not the generic answer, but the specific way this hire goes wrong in this company. The team that can describe the failure precisely is the team that understands the role. The team that cannot is usually about to hire the failure.
A responsibility is a thing you do. An outcome is a thing that is true a year from now because the right person was here.
What we calibrate from the market
The second half is not yours to decide, because the market has already decided it. We calibrate compensation against what the role actually clears right now, not what it cleared the last time you hired for something adjacent. In a category where AI talent is in open competition, last year's number is a quiet way to lose every candidate worth having.
We map competing demand: who else is hiring for this exact intersection, how aggressively, and what they are offering beyond cash. And we name the motivations that actually move the people you want. The strongest candidates are rarely moved by money alone. They are moved by the problem, the ownership, and the people they will work beside. If you do not know which of those your role offers, you cannot pitch it.
Held against your inputs, the market signal does something useful and occasionally unwelcome. It tells you when the role you have described and the role the market will fill are not the same role. Better to learn that on paper, in week one, than in week ten with an empty pipeline and a confused team.
Why writing it down changes the search
Something happens when the search becomes a document. The disagreements that would otherwise surface in a debrief, ten weeks late and attached to a real candidate, surface now, in the abstract, when they are cheap to resolve. Two founders who thought they agreed discover, on the page, that they were hiring two different people. The playbook found it before the search wasted a month on it.
It also gives the search a spine. Every later decision can be measured against it. Is this candidate strong on the outcomes we wrote, or merely impressive in the room? Are we drifting from the profile, and did we decide to, or did it just happen? A written search can answer those questions. An unwritten one can only have opinions about them.
The playbook belongs to the client
There is one principle that matters more than the rest. The playbook is yours. We build it, we calibrate it, we run the search against it, and when the engagement ends, it stays with you.
Most search leaves nothing behind but a hire and an invoice. The knowledge of how the role was defined, what the market said, and why this person and not another walks out the door with the recruiter. The next time you hire, you start from zero again. We would rather leave the system than take it. When the engagement ends, the playbook remains. It is a record you can run the next search against, sharpen, and make your own.