People

People is the operating workspace for early hiring and team management. The goal is not to recreate a full HR or ATS system. The goal is to help founders get the important parts right: what role to hire, how to run a clean search, how to onboard well, and how to avoid avoidable people-process chaos.

Overview

The Overview tab is the synthesis layer for the People module. It gives you a quick read on role priority, pipeline health, onboarding risk, and team-development follow-through.

Key signals:

• Role summary: Shows what roles are open, planned, paused, or filled.
• Hiring funnel snapshot: Gives a directional view of pipeline movement and conversion health.
• Hiring hygiene alerts: Calls out stale candidates, missing next steps, overdue interviews, and open roles with no funnel activity.
• Onboarding risks: Highlights missing managers, incomplete provisioning, missing 30/60/90 goals, and overdue setup tasks.
• Team development snapshot: Surfaces upcoming reviews, promotion readiness, and retention risk.

Why it matters:

• Hiring gets fragmented quickly when role planning, candidates, onboarding, and team operations all live in different places.
• The overview helps you see whether the system is actually ready to support a hire, not just whether some forms are filled in.

Tips:

• Use the overview as a control panel, not the final destination.
• Click into weak or risky cards directly and fix the underlying role, candidate, or onboarding plan.
• If a high-priority role is still vague in the overview, you are probably not ready to source aggressively yet.

Roles

The Roles tab is where you define the jobs you actually plan to hire for. It is stronger than a simple wishlist because each role can carry ownership, timing, salary context, scorecard expectations, and linked docs.

Key fields:

• Role title: The job you are actually planning around.
• Priority: Business urgency, not personal excitement.
• Status: Planned, open, paused, or filled.
• Owner: The person responsible for moving the search forward.
• Target hire date: When you need the role in seat.
• Salary band: The rough compensation range you expect.
• Employment type: Full-time, part-time, contract, or similar.
• Scorecard: The traits, outcomes, or capabilities that define success.
• Candidate funnel counts: Directional pipeline counts tied to the role.
• Linked docs: The hiring and onboarding templates that belong to the role.

Why it matters:

• A fuzzy role creates a fuzzy search.
• If success criteria are unclear before sourcing starts, interview quality usually drops and the process drifts.

Tips:

• Track only active or near-term roles.
• Write the scorecard around outcomes and evidence, not buzzwords.
• If a role has no owner or target date, it is probably not operational yet.

Hiring

The Hiring tab is your candidate pipeline. It helps you track who is in process, what stage they are in, what happens next, and whether the funnel is healthy enough to produce a good hire.

Key fields:

• Candidate name: The person in process.
• Linked role: The role they are being considered for.
• Owner: Who is accountable for keeping momentum.
• Source: Where the candidate came from.
• Stage: Their current position in the hiring funnel.
• Next step: The next concrete action in process.
• Next interview: The next scheduled touchpoint.
• Offer status: Whether the process is still exploratory or moving into offer territory.
• Notes: Important context that should not live in memory.

Funnel signals:

• Stage totals help you see whether the top or middle of the funnel is too thin.
• Conversion rates show where the process is breaking down.
• Source mix helps you see which channels are producing movement.
• Bottleneck signal highlights where candidates are getting stuck most often.
• Hiring hygiene alerts catch operational slippage early.

Tips:

• Keep stages simple enough that everyone uses them consistently.
• Every active candidate should have a next step or scheduled interview.
• Treat stale-candidate alerts as a process problem, not just a one-off cleanup task.

Interviews

The Interviews tab is where you capture scorecards and evidence from candidate conversations. This is where the process becomes defensible instead of vibe-driven.

Key fields:

• Candidate: The person the scorecard belongs to.
• Interviewer: Who completed the scorecard.
• Interview round: The stage or round the interview represents.
• Overall score: Directional summary of the conversation.
• Skill, values, communication scores: Structured dimensions for judgment.
• Strengths: The strongest evidence in favor of the candidate.
• Concerns: Specific reasons for hesitation.
• Evidence: The most important notes in the scorecard.
• Recommendation: The interviewer’s decision after the conversation.

Why it matters:

• Hiring quality drops when feedback is inconsistent, vague, or scattered across chat threads.
• Scorecards help you compare candidates on the same criteria and preserve useful evidence after the conversation fades.

Tips:

• Evidence matters more than the number alone.
• Use consistent criteria for the same role across interviewers.
• If two scorecards conflict, focus first on the evidence and concern patterns.

Onboarding

The Onboarding tab turns a new hire’s first ninety days into an actual plan instead of a loose intention. Each onboarding plan can track ownership, readiness, milestone tasks, and risk flags.

Key fields:

• Hire name: The person being onboarded.
• Linked role: The role they are stepping into.
• Owner: The person responsible for the onboarding process itself.
• Manager: The person accountable for role context and performance.
• Buddy: Optional peer support if you use it.
• Start date: The date readiness should be measured against.
• Equipment status: Whether the employee has what they need physically.
• Access status: Whether accounts and systems are ready.
• 30/60/90 goals: Outcome-based expectations for the ramp.
• Milestone tasks: Specific setup and ramp actions by checkpoint.

Risk signals:

• Missing manager
• Upcoming start with incomplete provisioning
• Missing 30/60/90 goals
• Overdue onboarding tasks

Tips:

• Separate logistics from role outcomes.
• Use tasks for concrete setup work and 30/60/90 goals for broader expectations.
• If access or equipment is unclear, the onboarding plan is not actually ready.

Operations

The Operations tab is the light People Ops layer. It helps you track the recurring work that keeps payroll, policy, compliance, and manager systems from drifting.

Key fields:

• Title: The policy, process, or operational item.
• Category: Payroll, benefits, compliance, policy, manager rituals, or similar.
• Owner: Who keeps the item current.
• Jurisdiction: Useful when the process depends on location-specific rules.
• Review cadence: How often it should be revisited.
• Last review / next review: Timing for maintenance.
• Linked document: The formal doc connected to the item.
• Notes: The context that makes the item usable.

Why it matters:

• People Ops work usually fails through drift rather than dramatic mistakes.
• A small team still needs predictable policy, payroll, and review habits once hires exist.

Tips:

• Start with the items people rely on most often.
• Make cadence explicit for anything that goes stale.
• Use linked docs when a policy or SOP needs a formal home.

Development

The Development tab is where you track performance cadence, coaching, retention risk, and promotion readiness for the team that already exists.

Key fields:

• Person: The employee or team member.
• Linked role: Their current role.
• Manager: Who is responsible for coaching and reviews.
• Review cadence: The rhythm for performance conversations.
• Last review / next review: The current review timeline.
• Performance status: Directional read on how things are going.
• Promotion readiness: Whether expanded scope may be appropriate.
• Retention risk: How likely the person is to become a retention issue.
• Career path: The next likely direction for growth.
• Development goals: What they should improve or expand.
• Manager coaching focus: The support or guidance they need now.
• Learning plan: Skills, training, or stretch work to reinforce development.

Why it matters:

• Early teams often skip structure until problems are already visible.
• This tab helps founders add just enough rhythm around growth, performance, and retention without turning into a heavy HR system.

Tips:

• Keep review cadence realistic enough to actually follow.
• Retention risk is only useful when it is tied to real evidence.
• Coaching focus should be actionable enough to influence the next 1:1.

Documents

The Documents tab turns the People workspace into editable outputs your team can use. These are generated from the data in the other tabs, so document quality depends on input quality.

Current document types include:

• Role Description
• Hiring Plan Brief
• Interview Scorecard Template
• Candidate Evaluation Summary
• Offer Letter
• Contractor SOW
• Onboarding Checklist
• Manager Onboarding Guide
• 30/60/90 Plan Template
• Equipment and Access Provisioning Checklist
• Employee Handbook
• Performance Review
• Offboarding Checklist

Why it matters:

• Documents save time only when they reflect real role, hiring, onboarding, and ops detail.
• A generic document is usually a signal that the underlying workspace still needs sharper inputs.

Tips:

• Generate documents after the relevant tabs are reasonably complete.
• Link role-specific docs back to the tracked role so they stay easy to find.
• Review legal and compliance-sensitive docs before treating them as final.