Verified against Claude · 2026-08-06
Write a first-hire scorecard before you write the job posting
Builds a Who-style scorecard — mission, measurable outcomes, then competencies — and behavioral interview questions tied to each outcome, so the hiring bar exists in writing before a single resume gets read.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
You are a hiring advisor using the "Who: The A Method for Hiring" scorecard approach — the scorecard is written before the job posting, and outcomes come before competencies, never the reverse.
CONTEXT
Role being hired: First customer success hire
What this hire needs to have accomplished 12 months from now for the hire to be a clear success: Onboarding time for a new clinic cut from 3 weeks to under 1 week, and churn among onboarded clinics under 5%
Company stage/team size right now: 9 paying clinics, 4-person team, no dedicated CS function yet
Traits or background you're currently assuming you want, if any: Healthcare industry background, prior startup experience
MISSION
Write a one-sentence mission for the role — why it exists, tied directly to Onboarding time for a new clinic cut from 3 weeks to under 1 week, and churn among onboarded clinics under 5%, not a generic responsibility description copied from a similar job posting elsewhere.
OUTCOMES
Write 3-4 specific, measurable outcomes this person must deliver in their first year, each with a number or a checkable state, not a vague responsibility ("owns marketing") — an outcome should be specific enough that you and this hire would agree in twelve months on whether it happened.
COMPETENCIES
Only after the outcomes are set, list the 4-6 competencies required to actually deliver them. If Healthcare industry background, prior startup experience includes something that doesn't clearly trace back to one of the outcomes above, flag it as an assumption worth questioning rather than silently including it because it felt obviously relevant.
BEHAVIORAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
For each competency, write one behavioral question asking for a specific past instance ("tell me about a time you...") rather than a hypothetical ("what would you do if..."), plus a one-line answer to look for that would count as a strong signal versus a weak one.
SCORING RUBRIC
Give a 1-4 scoring anchor for each competency (1 = clear miss, 4 = clear exceptional) written before any interview happens, so a score can't be reverse-engineered from how much an interviewer liked the candidate personally.
OUTPUT FORMAT
Mission, Outcomes, Competencies (with the assumed-trait flag if applicable), then a table of behavioral questions with signal notes and the 1-4 rubric.Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Writing outcomes before competencies is the actual mechanic from the scorecard method that prevents a common and specific hiring failure — backfilling a job description around a personality the founder liked in an interview, rather than defining what success looks like first and then hiring for the traits that would actually produce it; without the outcomes-first order, it's easy to fall in love with a candidate's energy in a conversation and only notice months later that they were never actually equipped to hit the number that mattered. Requiring behavioral questions tied to specific past instances instead of hypothetical questions closes a gap in the interview process that mirrors the Mom Test problem in customer discovery: 'what would you do if a clinic threatened to churn' invites a flattering, rehearsed answer about what the candidate would ideally do, while 'tell me about a specific time a customer threatened to churn and what you actually did' can only be answered with something that really happened, which is a far more reliable predictor of how this person behaves under real pressure. Writing the 1-4 scoring rubric before the interview happens — with anchors defined in advance for what a 1 versus a 4 actually looks like — is what stops a specific and well-documented bias in unstructured hiring: an interviewer who liked a candidate personally will unconsciously score their answers more generously across every competency, and a rubric written and anchored before the conversation starts is what keeps a likable but under-qualified answer from getting graded up after the fact to match a gut feeling that formed in the first five minutes.
What you get back
Mission: Own the onboarding-to-retention journey for every new clinic, so time-to-value drops and early churn stays rare. Outcomes: Cut median onboarding time from 3 weeks to under 1 week within 6 months. Keep 12-month churn among onboarded clinics under 5%. Build a repeatable onboarding checklist usable without the founder's direct involvement within 90 days. Competencies: Process design under ambiguity, direct customer communication under pressure, data literacy (can read a churn signal before it becomes a cancellation). Flagged assumption: "Healthcare industry background" doesn't clearly trace to any outcome above — worth testing for aptitude and communication style instead of requiring industry tenure specifically. Sample question (process design): "Tell me about a time you built a repeatable process from scratch with no existing template to follow." Strong signal: names a specific ambiguous starting point and a concrete first version they shipped, not a "we workshopped it as a team" answer with no ownership. Rubric: 1 = describes a process someone else designed. 4 = designed and iterated a process solo, with a measurable before/after.
Verified against
Claude Sonnet 5 · 2026-08-06
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-01
Changelog
- 2026-08-06 — Initial publish, verified against Claude Sonnet 5 and ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
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