Capability template for recruiting and hiring

Job posting and sourcing plan

For one approved role, the hiring manager gets a plan for where to post and where to look: every channel on the company's own list ordered by the signal it should give for that kind of role, a week-by-week schedule inside the budget, and what to count on each channel. Nothing is posted or paid until a person approves.

The outcome

The role goes out to the few places most likely to bring people who can do the work, instead of to every board at once. Each channel you use gets an expected signal for this kind of role: from your own counts where you keep them, and from a starting table by role family where you do not. The plan takes channels in that order until the budget, the team's hours or your weekly spending limit says stop, and it shows what each week costs, what is left, and which paid posts run out before the search ends.

Every channel in the plan also gets its count: what arrives, how it is tagged, who counts it, and a review after the second week at which the hiring manager decides what carries on. Search by search, the plan moves off the starting table and onto your own numbers.

It prepares and nothing more. It names no board and no price you did not give it, it posts and pays for nothing, and it never sees an applicant. People make every decision about who goes forward.

Who starts the work, and when

The hiring manager starts it, or the recruiter or office manager working for them, once the role is approved and its description agreed and before anything is posted. The budget holder approves the spend. Run it again at the review point with the counts so far, or whenever the budget, the dates or your list of channels change.

What they supply

The approved role brief: title, team, location and hours, pay range, openings and must-haves.
Your channel list: each board, community, college, referral scheme, agency or service you are willing to use, with its cost, how it is charged, the team time it takes each week and who looks after it.
Your counts from earlier searches, if you keep them: applicants and first interviews for each channel.
The budget, any weekly limit, the length of the search and the team hours available each week.

What comes out

One plan in a fixed order: the role in brief; every channel in order, with the reason for its place and whether it made the plan; a weekly schedule with the spend, running total and hours; what to count on each channel and the rules for the review; a check that at least one channel is open to anyone; numbered decisions for the hiring manager and the budget holder; and the defaults used. Fees paid only when someone is hired, such as a referral bonus or an agency fee, sit apart from the budget. Every figure can be checked by hand.

An invented example

Illustrative example with invented data. The company, its roles, its channels, its costs, its counts and every word of its notes below are invented. Trade Board A, General Board B, College C, Trade association D, Agency E and Profile search service F stand for channels a company might use; none is a real organisation. The company is an invented 40-person bench joinery workshop that makes fitted furniture. Its operations manager has approval to hire a workshop team lead and wants applicants in front of them before the holidays.

The inputs come first, in full, so the template can be run on them. The plan the capability returned follows.

The inputs

1. The role brief

Typed by the operations manager, as supplied.

Role: Workshop team lead
Team: Production (bench joinery)
Location: on site at our workshop, Monday to Friday, 7:00 to 15:30
Openings: 1
Pay: $58,000 to $66,000 a year
Must-haves:
- Time-served joiner, able to set out and make from shop drawings
- Has led a small crew (3 or more) day to day
- Safe use of panel saw, spindle moulder and CNC router
Approved: yes, by the managing director, 4 November 2026

2. The channel list

Exported by the office manager.

channel,type,cost,cost_basis,hours_per_week,owner,notes
Trade Board A,specialist-board,180,per post,1,Office manager,Post runs 28 days
College C joinery course,local,0,free,0.5,Operations manager,Careers office shares it with final-year students and recent leavers
Staff referral ask,referral,500,per hire,0.5,Operations manager,Bonus paid once the person hired completes 90 days
Careers page and social accounts,own-channels,0,free,0.5,Office manager,
Trade association D jobs bulletin,community,250,per month,0.5,Operations manager,Regional members' bulletin
Agency E,agency,18,percent of base pay,0.5,Operations manager,Contingent fee; terms not agreed
General Board B,general-board,90,per week,2,Office manager,Sponsored listing
Profile search service F,direct-outreach,120,per month,3,Operations manager,One seat

3. The channel record

Counts from last year's search for a bench joiner, kept by the office manager.

channel,role_searched,applicants,first_interviews
Trade Board A,Bench joiner (2025),14,4
General Board B,Bench joiner (2025),64,3
Staff referral ask,Bench joiner (2025),5,3
College C joinery course,Bench joiner (2025),6,1

4. Budget, time and settings

Prepared for: Operations manager (hiring manager)
Approves the plan: Operations manager
Budget holder: Managing director
Date: 10 November 2026
Search: 6 weeks, week 1 starts Monday 16 November 2026
Budget: $1,500 in total, no more than $400 in any one week
Sourcing hours: 6 a week, between the office manager and me
Most channels at once: 5
Review: after week 2
Role family: (left blank)

The output

SOURCING PLAN: Workshop team lead
Status: Draft for approval. Nothing has been posted, paid or sent.
Prepared for: Operations manager. Approves the plan: Operations manager. Budget holder: Managing director. Date: 10 November 2026.
Search: 6 weeks, week 1 starts Monday 16 November 2026. Budget: $1,500 in total; weekly cap $400. Sourcing hours: 6 a week.

1. The role
Title: Workshop team lead. Team: Production (bench joinery). Location and pattern: on site at our workshop, Monday to Friday, 7:00 to 15:30. Openings: 1. Pay range: $58,000 to $66,000 a year. Must-haves: 3, from the brief. Target start: not stated. Approved by: Managing director, 4 November 2026.
Role family: Skilled trades and technical crafts (chosen from the brief, to confirm).

2. Channels ranked
1. Trade Board A (specialist-board). Expected signal: High; own record: 4 of 14 reached first interview (29%), Bench joiner (2025). Cost: $180 per post. Hours: 1 a week. Owner: Office manager. In the plan from week 1.
2. College C joinery course (local). Expected signal: High; default for this family; record too small: 1 of 6. Cost: free. Hours: 0.5 a week. Owner: Operations manager. In the plan from week 1.
3. Staff referral ask (referral). Expected signal: High; default for this family; record too small: 3 of 5. Cost: $500 per hire. Hours: 0.5 a week. Owner: Operations manager. In the plan from week 1.
4. Careers page and social accounts (own-channels). Expected signal: Medium; default for this family. Cost: free. Hours: 0.5 a week. Owner: Office manager. In the plan from week 1.
5. Trade association D jobs bulletin (community). Expected signal: Medium; default for this family. Cost: $250 per month. Hours: 0.5 a week. Owner: Operations manager. In the plan from week 2, moved by the weekly cap.
6. Agency E (agency). Expected signal: Medium; default for this family. Cost: 18 percent of base pay. Hours: 0.5 a week. Owner: Operations manager. Not in this plan: channel limit.
7. General Board B (general-board). Expected signal: Low; own record: 3 of 64 reached first interview (5%), Bench joiner (2025). Cost: $90 per week. Hours: 2 a week. Owner: Office manager. Not in this plan: signal.
8. Profile search service F (direct-outreach). Expected signal: Low; default for this family. Cost: $120 per month. Hours: 3 a week. Owner: Operations manager. Not in this plan: signal.
Needs a decision before ranking: none.
Types rated High for this family with no channel on your list: none.

3. Weekly schedule
Week 1, Monday 16 November: Starts: Trade Board A; College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts. Continues: none. Lapses: none. Spend: $180. Running total: $180. Team hours: 2.5 of 6.
Week 2, Monday 23 November: Starts: Trade association D jobs bulletin. Continues: Trade Board A; College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts. Lapses: none. Spend: $250. Running total: $430. Team hours: 3 of 6.
Week 3, Monday 30 November, subject to the review: Starts: none. Continues: Trade Board A; College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts; Trade association D jobs bulletin. Lapses: none. Spend: $0. Running total: $430. Team hours: 3 of 6.
Week 4, Monday 7 December, subject to the review: Starts: none. Continues: College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts; Trade association D jobs bulletin. Lapses: Trade Board A, last day Sunday 13 December. Spend: $0. Running total: $430. Team hours: 3 of 6.
Week 5, Monday 14 December, subject to the review: Starts: none. Continues: College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts; Trade association D jobs bulletin. Lapses: none. Spend: $0. Running total: $430. Team hours: 2 of 6.
Week 6, Monday 21 December, subject to the review: Starts: none. Continues: College C joinery course; Staff referral ask; Careers page and social accounts; Trade association D jobs bulletin. Lapses: none. Spend: $250. Running total: $680. Team hours: 2 of 6.
Planned spend: $680 of $1,500; unspent $820.
Payable only on a hire, outside the budget: Staff referral ask: $500, once the person hired completes 90 days.

4. What to measure
Trade Board A: counts applications received through the posting. Tagged by the posting's own reference or link. Counted by the office manager.
College C joinery course: counts enquiries and applications through the careers office. Tagged by the notice's own reference. Counted by the operations manager.
Staff referral ask: counts people referred who apply. Tagged by the referral form, which records who referred. Counted by the operations manager.
Careers page and social accounts: counts applications received through the posting. Tagged by the posting's own reference or link. Counted by the office manager.
Trade association D jobs bulletin: counts applications and replies from the bulletin. Tagged by the bulletin notice's own reference. Counted by the operations manager.
Each week, every channel's owner records:
applicants or replies; first interviews; spend to date; team hours.
Review after week 2 ends on Sunday 29 November: list each channel with spend and no first interview, and each channel with at least 10 applicants of whom fewer than 8% reached a first interview. Started in week 2, so not listed for spend without a first interview: Trade association D jobs bulletin. The operations manager decides whether each channel continues, changes or stops. To re-plan, run this template again with the counts so far as the channel record.

5. Reach
Open to anyone in this plan: Trade Board A; Careers page and social accounts.
Marked as reaching groups you want to reach more of: none marked in the channel list.

6. Decisions and open questions
1. For the operations manager: no role family was given, and the plan uses Skilled trades and technical crafts, chosen from the title and the must-haves. Is that right? A different family changes the default levels and may change which channels are in the plan.
2. For the operations manager: the brief gives no target start date. When should the new team lead start?
3. For the operations manager: the Trade Board A post runs 28 days, so its last day is Sunday 13 December and weeks 5 and 6 are not covered. Should it be renewed for those weeks at $180? The renewal is not in the planned spend; with it, planned spend would be $860 of $1,500.
4. For the managing director: please approve the planned spend of $680 (Trade Board A, $180 in week 1; Trade association D jobs bulletin, $250 in week 2 and $250 in week 6) and the $500 staff referral bonus, payable only on a hire, once the person hired completes 90 days.

7. Inputs not supplied and defaults used
- Role family: not given; chosen from the brief (decision 1).
- Target start date: not stated (decision 2).
- Record minimum: default, 10 applicants.
- Record levels: default, High at 20% or more reaching a first interview, Medium at 8% or more, Low below 8%.
- Low-channel floor: default, 2.

Draft for approval by the operations manager; spend for approval by the managing director. Nothing has been posted, paid, booked or sent, no agency terms have been agreed, and no candidate has been seen or assessed.

How the figures were worked out

Signal from the record. Trade Board A: 4 of 14 is 28.6%, at or above 20%, so High, the same as the family default. General Board B: 3 of 64 is 4.7%, below 8%, so Low in place of the default Medium. Staff referral ask (5 applicants) and College C (6) are below the minimum of 10, so each keeps its default.
Order within a level. In High, Trade Board A comes first because its record counted; College C (no spend) comes before the staff referral ask, which is paid per hire and goes last. In Medium, the careers page (no spend) comes before the bulletin ($250 in weeks 1 and 5 if started in week 1: $500), and Agency E, a percentage fee, goes last. In Low, General Board B's record counted, so it comes before Profile search service F.
Choosing. The first four enter in week 1, using 2.5 of the 6 hours and $180. The bulletin would take week 1 to $430, over the $400 cap, so it starts in week 2, marked as moved by the weekly cap, charged in weeks 2 and 6 (neither week then goes over $400), and uses 0.5 more hours: five channels, the limit. Because it starts in week 2, the review after week 2 names it as started that week rather than listing it for spend without a first interview. Agency E stops at the channel limit. General Board B and Profile search service F are Low with five High or Medium channels already in, so they stop at signal.
Spend. $180 + $250 + $250 = $680; $1,500 − $680 = $820 unspent. No week goes over $400.
The post's last day. 28 days from Monday 16 November, counted inclusively, ends on Sunday 13 December, in week 4.
Hours. Weeks 2 to 4: 1 + 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 = 3. Weeks 5 and 6, without Trade Board A: 2.

Where it fits

Recruiting and hiring, where the money and hours spent on finding people are easiest to waste and hardest to see.
Software technology, where engineering, sales and design roles each have their own communities, and one generic posting everywhere brings volume without the right people.
Professional services, where specialist hires tend to come through professional bodies and referrals rather than general boards.
Manufacturing, where trade roles fill through colleges, trade boards and the crew's own contacts.
Hospitality, where frontline roles open often and the company's own channels cost nothing.
Growth & scaling, when several roles are open at once and every week of spend has to earn its place.
Startups & new ventures, where the earliest hires usually come from people the founders, advisers and investors already know.

What has to change for your company

Write your channel list once, with real costs and owners, and keep it current; the plan uses nothing else. Choose how many channels run at once, which week the review falls in, and how many applicants a channel needs before its own counts replace the starting table. Move channel types up or down the table for your market. Decide what counts as a first interview and where the counts are kept, and name who approves the plan and who holds the budget.

Any rule about where a role must be advertised, or what an advertisement must say, comes from your people lead and your advisers; the template applies none of its own. It runs in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini from the documents you supply, with no connection to any job board or applicant tracking system.

What has been checked

Fully Powered AI wrote this capability template, drawing on one openly licensed method that is credited in its sources. It was editorially reviewed on 10 November 2026. It was tried on its invented example in Claude on 10 November 2026; the record of the latest run is published with it and lists the ambiguities it met. The record says plainly that the run was not blind to the published example output, so a blind run is still to do. It has not yet been tested in a client environment, and not yet tested as a packaged version in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini.

Testing in your environment means running it on two or three past searches you counted by channel, plus hard cases written in advance: a channel list with a renamed column, a paid post that runs out mid-search, a request to pick the best applicants. The person who ran those searches checks every level and every figure before anyone relies on it. Pilot acceptance-test preparation sets those cases up, and what we test before we call an AI workflow ready describes the record we keep.

The full capability template

Everything above is the outline. The complete capability template is the working version: the roles, the inputs, the procedure, the exceptions and stop conditions, the output format, the reviewer checklist, the acceptance tests, the instructions for an AI assistant and what to customize for your company. It comes with a download and the link to its folder in Fully Powered’s public repository.

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