A hiring brief should define what the person will own, the experience the role requires and the evidence your team will examine. Include team context, timing and questions to explore consistently. Use the brief to guide sourcing and interviews while keeping the hiring decision with people.
What would you need to see to understand whether someone can do this work?
01 / Start with responsibilities.
Describe the work before producing a long list of technologies or traits. An engineer responsible for maintaining an existing service faces different questions from someone building its first version. Both roles may share a title.
Try writing three responsibilities in plain language. For each one, identify the knowledge or behavior that would help a person perform it. Mark which requirements matter at the start and which could develop with context. This separates essential experience from a wish list.
02 / Decide what useful evidence looks like.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management describes structured interviews as a way to assess job-related competencies through questions about past behavior or hypothetical situations. Its guidance also emphasizes consistency in questions and assessment.
For your brief, connect each important responsibility to something the team can discuss or examine. Avoid treating a broad adjective as an assessment plan. “Communicates clearly” becomes more useful when linked to explaining a technical tradeoff to a colleague.
- Responsibility: what the person will own
- Evidence: what could demonstrate relevant ability
- Assessment: how the team will examine that evidence
03 / Make the review understandable.
A score is easier to discuss when the observations behind it remain available. Keep the question, the relevant evidence, and the reviewer’s reasoning together. A shared rating approach can give interviewers a common basis for discussion; it does not remove the need for judgment.
OPM’s structured interview guide explains how common rating scales support a structured assessment. Use any rubric in the context of the actual job and the evidence being assessed.
OPM: Structured Interview Guide (opens in a new tab)04 / Keep the decision with people.
AI can prepare summaries and organize information. The hiring team needs to examine the evidence, correct gaps and take responsibility for its decision. Assign that responsibility before choosing a tool.
For an initial conversation with NYCG, bring the role, the responsibilities, the team context and your timing. Those details let the discussion start with the work you need done.
- Role and responsibilities
- Relevant experience and evidence
- Team and working context
- Timing and known constraints
From a responsibility to a useful question
- Responsibility
- Own an existing software service, including releases and operational issues.
- Relevant evidence
- A specific change the person delivered, what they were responsible for and how they checked its effect.
- Assessment question
- Walk through a release that did not go as expected. What did you observe, what did you decide and what changed afterward?
- Reviewer reasoning
- Look for a clear account of the person's own contribution, how they investigated the issue and how they worked with others. Record open questions alongside observations.
- Team context
- Which decisions can this person make independently? Who supports them? What must they know on arrival, and what can they learn?