A hiring plan that fits on one page

Most hiring plans are a headcount spreadsheet with a start date column. That tells you what you want and nothing about whether it is possible. This one includes the funnel maths, which is where plans usually break.

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The number that matters is not how many people you want to hire. It is how many hours of recruiting capacity you have per open role, and most teams are three times over-committed before the quarter starts.

Fill in the funnel section honestly using your own last three hires. If you do not have the numbers, the defaults below are reasonable starting points for engineering roles.

Copy the one you need

1. One page hiring plan

Quarterly, reviewed monthly

Period: [Q, year]
Owner: [Name]
Budget approved: [amount]

Roles, in priority order
1. [Title] · [Team] · [Level] · Target start: [date] · Why now: [one line]
2. [Title] · [Team] · [Level] · Target start: [date] · Why now:
3. [Title] · [Team] · [Level] · Target start: [date] · Why now:

Sequencing rule: no more than [number] roles actively sourced at once. Everything else is queued, not open.

Per role
- Salary band: [range] · Agreed with: [name] · Date:
- Hiring manager: [name] · Hours per week they can commit: [number]
- Interview panel: [names]
- Decision maker: [name]

Kill criteria: if the role is still open on [date], we [re-scope it / raise the band / stop and revisit].

2. Funnel maths

Do this before you promise a start date

Work backwards from one hire.

Hires needed: 1
Offers to get 1 hire: 1.3 (75% acceptance)
Finals to get 1 offer: 3
Screens to get 1 final: 5
Replies to get 1 screen: 3
Outreach to get 1 reply: 6

So: roughly 350 sourced candidates per engineering hire.

Time cost at 4 minutes of human attention per sourced candidate: about 23 hours per hire, before a single interview.

Sanity check: multiply by open roles. If the total exceeds the recruiting hours you actually have this quarter, the plan is fiction. Cut roles or change how the top of the funnel gets done.

3. Weekly review format

15 minutes, same slot every week

For each open role:
- Stage counts this week vs last: [sourced / replied / screened / onsite / offer]
- Oldest candidate waiting on us: [name, days waiting, who is blocking]
- Decisions needed from me today: [list]
- Change since last week: [one sentence]

Rule: any candidate waiting more than 3 days on an internal decision gets named out loud. Slow feedback loses more hires than a weak pitch.

4. Role scoping brief

Before the job description exists

Role: [Title]

In 12 months, this person will have: [three outcomes, not responsibilities]
1.
2.
3.

Must have, with evidence we can check: [two things, maximum]
Nice to have: [everything else goes here]
Hard no: [the genuine dealbreakers]

Who is already doing part of this job today: [name]
What breaks if we do not hire this: [honest answer, sometimes "nothing yet"]
Comparable people we admire: [two or three named examples and where they work]

Where hiring plans break

Opening every approved role at once. Three roles worked properly beat eight roles worked badly, and the eight will still be open next quarter.

Planning headcount without planning recruiter and hiring manager hours. Capacity is the constraint, not budget.

No kill criteria. Roles that should have been re-scoped in week four stay open for five months because nobody agreed in advance what failure looked like.

Salary bands agreed after the first screen. You will meet someone great and then spend two weeks getting approval you could have had on day one.

Every hiring plan assumes someone has the hours to work it.

That assumption is wrong in most companies by the second week of the quarter.

I take the part that scales badly, so the plan survives contact with a normal working month.

What people ask about this

How many roles can one recruiter run properly?

Four to six actively sourced roles for a full time recruiter, fewer if the roles are senior or the market is thin. Founders doing this alongside a company should assume one, maybe two.

What if we do not have historical funnel numbers?

Use the defaults in the maths block for the first quarter, then replace them with your own. After three hires your real conversion rates are more useful than any benchmark.

Where does Laidback fit in a plan like this?

The 23 hours per hire at the top of the funnel. I run the sourcing, the drafting and the chasing so the plan stops being limited by how many candidate profiles a human can read in a week.