Improve a hiring brief
Examine the role's scope, requirements and tradeoffs. Get a written diagnosis and a revised brief to discuss with your client.
Hiring Reality Report · £99For recruiters and hiring managers
Better briefs. Better prepared conversations.
Practical support for the hiring decision and the candidate's next conversation.
Two ways to use TechWaymark: improve the client's brief, or help a candidate prepare examples they choose to share. Your recruitment stays in your existing system. Candidate preparation is a private pilot; the Hiring Reality Report below is a separate purchase.
Prepare a candidate
Turn role requirements into preparation prompts. The candidate keeps their answers private and chooses what to share. Your ATS remains your recruitment record.
Explore the private-pilot example →Explore Hiring Reality Report examples and how it works
What a diagnosis looks like
Three illustrative briefs. One sentence each.
The headline is the part a recruiter forwards. The full report carries the reasoning, the ninety day forecast, and the scope edits.
Security Architect. Open ninety days.
The title says architect. The deliverables are governance.
A title-and-scope mismatch may deter architects seeking design ownership and attract people expecting a different job. Check that hypothesis against applicant feedback before treating it as the cause of a stalled search.
Cloud Engineer. AWS hard-required.
You're hiring an AWS engineer for an almost entirely Azure estate.
An AWS-only requirement may exclude relevant Azure experience. Review which platform skills are needed immediately and which can transfer; the brief alone cannot establish how quickly a particular hire will contribute.
Cloud Operations. Architecture asks.
The seat is scoped as operations. The work is platform design.
Operations and platform-design expectations may be competing in one brief. Align title, scope and reward before searching. Retention and performance cannot be predicted from the wording alone.
Reader fit
Useful if
- You're a recruiter sitting on a role that's been open 60+ days and the client is starting to ask why.
- You're an in-house hiring manager who can feel the brief is off but can't name what's wrong.
- You want a written third-party diagnosis the hiring manager will actually read, not a recruiter opinion.
Not for you if
- You want a candidate shortlist. The Hiring Reality Report diagnoses briefs, not candidates.
- You want a guaranteed explanation of hiring outcomes. The report examines the supplied brief and states what remains uncertain.
- The brief is a placeholder. HRR needs evidence of the actual deliverables; it can't diagnose a job title alone.
What you actually get
One brief in. Four answers out.
A worked example. The four output fields are the product. Illustrative demonstration.
Cloud Security Engineer
London. Hybrid. £85k to £100k.
AWS, Azure, Terraform, Kubernetes, incident response, security tooling (CSPM, SIEM, EDR), three years minimum in a security function.
Seventy two days. Two offers declined.
You receive
The brief may be narrowing the pool for the work described.
The deliverables emphasise cloud platform ownership, while the minimum experience filters for a security background. Check whether that requirement is excluding relevant infrastructure experience.
Relevant cloud engineers may not apply. Ask about production infrastructure work rather than assuming capability from a security title. Compare the diagnosis with actual candidate feedback and assessment evidence.
Reframe the seat as cloud platform ownership with security accountability. Move the three year security minimum to two years of production cloud engineering. The pool you want reads platform titles, not security ones.
The full sample carries the reasoning behind each field and the ninety day forecast if the brief doesn't change. Read it at recruiters/sample.
The shift
TechWaymark doesn't tell you whether a candidate is right for the role.
It tells you whether the role is right for the market.
When recruiters use it
Five moments, not a use case list.
Recruiters don't think in pathologies. They think in moments where the search is about to break, or already has.
When a new brief arrives
Run it before you start the search. If the brief is hunting the wrong pool, you find out on day one instead of day sixty.
When a role has been open sixty days or more
Replace 'the market is tough' with a specific written diagnosis the client can act on. Stops the search from being quietly written off.
When candidate quality is lower than expected
If the strongest applicants on paper would struggle on day one, the brief is filtering for the wrong background. The report names which background.
When the hiring manager insists the market is the problem
Use a written independent judgement to make the specification problem concrete and give the hiring manager something specific to challenge.
Before committing to a search you're unsure about
Some briefs aren't fillable as written. Knowing that before you pitch the fee changes the conversation you have with the client.
How it works
One brief in. One written judgment out.
You send us the brief. We return a written diagnosis covering what's wrong with the role as specified, why that's keeping the seat open, what the next ninety days look like if nothing changes, and the specific scope edits that would change who applies. Built on TechWaymark's practitioner-authored assessment framework. If the brief doesn't carry enough evidence to support a diagnosis, the report says so and names what's missing rather than guessing.
Read the full sample at recruiters/sample.
What helps HRR see the shape of the role
HRR needs evidence, not a perfect brief.
Some recruiter briefs carry enough for a diagnosis. Where they don't, HRR will tell you exactly what's missing rather than fill the gap with a guess. There are no mandatory fields. The five things below are what tend to make a diagnosis sharper.
Responsibilities and deliverables
What the hire is actually expected to ship in the first six months.
Technologies or capabilities
Tools, platforms, or domains the work touches. Brand names are fine, outcomes are better.
Team and reporting context
Who they sit with, who they report to, whether anyone reports to them.
Success measures
What good looks like at six and twelve months. Even one line changes the diagnosis.
Ownership or scope
Whether the seat owns a platform, supports one, or sits across several.
The issue is never length. It's evidence. Short briefs with clear ownership and outcomes diagnose cleanly. Long briefs that list tools without context often don't.
Hiring Reality Report
£99per report·One-off payment. No subscription.
One price. The report is the product. Send a brief in, get a written diagnosis back with a rewritten brief you can forward to the hiring manager.
Full report on screen and by email
Read it in the browser, send the PDF to the client. Same content either way.
Rewritten brief included
A version of the role filtered for the work the seat actually does, ready to send to the hiring manager.
Refunded if we can't diagnose
Full refund if the brief is too thin to diagnose, or if the report does not arrive inside two working days.
Reports stay accessible
Kept 24 months, then deleted. Deletion on request at any time.
Send the role you'd commission first. The brief becomes your HRR and the private link arrives by email within two working days of payment.
Request a Hiring Reality ReportHow your information is handled
Your report, your inputs and your access link are kept for 24 months from purchase so you can come back to them. After that they are deleted and the link stops working. You can request deletion at any time. We respond without undue delay and normally within one month, and explain any records we must retain or any permitted extension.