Hiring is a go-to-market function. Most founders run it like a favour.

I have placed hundreds of people into founder-led companies. The pattern is consistent. The companies that hire well do not have better instincts. They have a process. The ones that struggle hire from memory, from urgency, or from gut feel. The result is the same every time: wrong person, wrong seat, expensive mistake.

Hiring has five stages. Most founders only consciously manage one or two of them. That is where the funnel leaks.

Here is how each stage works, where founders lose candidates, and what good looks like.

Most job ads fail before they go live. The founder writes a title and a list of responsibilities without asking the hard questions: What does this person own in month three? What does success look like at the twelve-month mark? Who does this person work with most? What does bad look like?

Without clear answers, you attract the wrong candidates and repel the right ones. You also make interviews harder because you have nothing concrete to assess against.

Alignment means writing the role scorecard before you write the job ad. Define the outcomes, the behaviours, the reporting line, and the non-negotiables. If you cannot write those down, you are not ready to hire. Slow down here and speed up everywhere else.

Most founders post a job and hope. That is not a hiring strategy.

A strong Attract stage means running active sourcing alongside passive advertising. It means writing a job ad that speaks to the candidate's career goals, not just the company's needs. It means having a clear, factual employer brand: what it is actually like to work there, why the role matters, what the person will build.

The best candidates in any market are not actively looking. They respond to specific, well-crafted outreach, not generic LinkedIn messages. Volume is not the problem. Quality and targeting are.

If your pipeline is thin, the leak is here.

The most common interview feedback I hear from founders: "It just felt right." That feeling is not a hiring decision. It is a bias signal.

Assessment means running a structured interview process with the same questions for every candidate, scored on the same criteria. It means including a practical component that reflects actual work. It means involving more than one perspective before you decide.

Structured interviews outperform unstructured ones on every measure of predictive validity. They take more time to design up front. They save significant time and money by reducing bad hires.

If you are winging interviews, you are not assessing. You are hoping.

Founders lose good candidates at the offer stage more often than they realise. The candidate accepts a counteroffer, goes cold after the verbal, or declines without a clear reason.

Most of those losses are avoidable. Closing is an active process. It starts in the first conversation, not when you write the offer letter.

During every interview, you are also selling the role. You are understanding what the candidate needs, what they are weighing, and whether the offer you can make will work for them. By the time you put the number in writing, the candidate should already know they want the job.

Close the person, then confirm with the paperwork.

A hire does not convert to a contributor automatically. The first 90 days determine whether the person succeeds or leaves.

Good onboarding is not a welcome email and a laptop. It is a structured ramp with clear milestones, regular check-ins, and early wins designed into the role. It removes ambiguity about what good looks like and who to go to for what.

The cost of a failed hire is typically six to twelve months of salary plus recruitment fees, plus the productivity loss during the gap. Most of those failures happen because onboarding is treated as administration rather than an extension of the hiring process.

Build the onboarding plan before the person starts. The plan shows respect for their time and accelerates the return on your investment in hiring them.

The diagnostic scores each stage on one dimension above all others: is this process documented and repeatable by someone other than you?

Every founder can run a hiring process when they are fully engaged, with full context, in a familiar market. The question is whether your process survives growth, delegation, and the next hire in a new function.

A documented process captures the decisions you have already made. It makes those decisions available to your recruiter, your co-founder, your hiring manager. It removes reliance on the founder's presence in every interview and every offer conversation.

The companies that scale their teams consistently have written hiring playbooks. The companies that re-create the process from scratch each time pay for it in bad hires, long vacancies, and founder time that should be going elsewhere.

Your score on this diagnostic is a direct measure of how much of your hiring process exists only in your head.

The diagnostic gives you a stage-by-stage score. Your worst leak is where to start. Not the average. The worst one.

Fix one stage before you move to the next. A better Align process will improve every stage downstream. A better Assess process will reduce offer declines because you are selecting for fit more accurately.

The diagnostic also gives you a recommended fix for your weakest stage. That fix is specific and implementable. Put it in front of the person responsible for your next hire.

Hiring is a craft. Like any craft, it improves with feedback and iteration. Most founders never get that feedback because they do not measure the process. This diagnostic is the feedback loop.

James MacDonald Director, NTP Talent