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A disjointed recruiting process costs you time, damages candidate experience, and leads to inconsistent hiring decisions. With a Seilers hiring playbook, you document every step of the process — from opening a requisition to handing the new hire off to onboarding — so your entire recruiting team works from the same source of truth. Whether you’re a two-person HR team or a scaled talent organization, a well-structured playbook means no step gets skipped and every candidate gets a fair, consistent experience.

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What to Include

A strong hiring playbook covers the full recruiting lifecycle. Build your playbook around these core sections:
Define who can open a requisition, what approvals are required, and what information must be included (role level, budget, target start date, hiring manager name).
List the job boards, LinkedIn strategies, employee referral program details, and any agency relationships you use. Include the criteria for what makes a sourced candidate worth advancing.
Document how applications are reviewed, who reviews them, the timeline for initial responses, and the criteria used to move candidates to a phone screen.
Outline every interview round — phone screen, hiring manager interview, panel interview, take-home assignment — and include the scoring rubrics your team uses to evaluate candidates objectively.
Specify when reference checks happen, who conducts them, what questions are asked, and how the feedback is documented.
Detail who drafts the offer, the approval chain, the background check vendor and steps, and the timeline from verbal offer to signed letter.
Describe the information passed from recruiting to HR and the hiring manager before the new hire’s first day — equipment requests, system access, welcome messages, and onboarding schedule.

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Building It in Seilers

1

Create a new Playbook from the Hiring template

In Seilers, go to Playbooks → New Playbook and select the Hiring template. This pre-populates the structure with the standard sections so you’re not starting from a blank page.
2

Customize each section for your team

Replace the placeholder content in each section with your actual process. Update the sourcing channels to reflect where you post jobs, adjust the interview stages to match your current loop, and add any role-specific notes.
3

Embed your Screening SOP and Interview SOP as linked SOPs

Within the Application Review and Interview Stages sections, use the Link SOP option to attach your existing Screening SOP and Interview SOP. This keeps detailed step-by-step instructions in a dedicated SOP while surfacing them in context inside the playbook.
4

Assign owners to each stage

Use the Assign Owner control on each section to tag the responsible person — for example, the Talent Lead for sourcing, the Hiring Manager for interview evaluation, and HR for offer letters. Owners receive notifications when their section is updated or due for review.
5

Publish and share with the recruiting team

Once all sections are complete, click Publish. Copy the shareable link and distribute it to your recruiting team. Team members can follow the playbook directly in Seilers without needing edit access.

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Keeping It Current

A hiring playbook that goes stale is worse than no playbook — it creates false confidence and leads to process drift. Use these practices to keep yours accurate:
  • Schedule a quarterly review. Set a recurring review reminder in Seilers (go to Playbook Settings → Review Reminders) so the owner is prompted every quarter to confirm nothing has changed. If your hiring cycle is seasonal, align reviews with the start of each cycle.
  • Use version labels. When you make significant updates — new interview format, new job board, updated offer approval chain — create a version label such as Q1 Hiring Cycle or Post-Reorg v2. Version labels let your team know which iteration is current and give you a clear audit trail.
  • Log change notes. Use the Change Notes field when publishing a new version to summarize what changed and why. This helps new team members understand the history of the process.
Link your hiring playbook directly to your onboarding playbook so the Day 1 Handoff section connects seamlessly to the first step of onboarding. This creates an unbroken process chain from candidate acceptance to the new hire’s first week.

Onboarding Playbook

Set up a structured first week for every new hire with a dedicated onboarding playbook.

Playbook Templates

Browse all available Seilers playbook templates to jumpstart your process documentation.