AfterWorc Blog · Hiring guides

How to write a hiring brief that gets you three good candidates in 48 hours

AfterWorc team · 8 Sept 2026 · 1 min read

• Describe the outcome, not a list of 20 skills.
• Say what is fixed: budget, start date, time zone.
• Name one thing that would make a candidate a clear no.

Long job descriptions slow hiring down. A matcher needs to understand the outcome you want and the limits you have.

The five questions

1. What should be true in three months? For example: “Our card payouts run without manual fixes.”
2. What is already in place? Stack, team, tools, providers.
3. What is fixed? Budget or rate, start date, working hours or time zone, language.
4. Who will they work with? A lead, a founder, an existing team.
5. What is a clear no? One or two deal-breakers, not ten.

What to leave out

• a long list of “nice to have” skills
• company history
• vague words like “rockstar” or “self-starter”

Example

We are an EMI going live with a second acquirer in May. We need a payment integrations engineer for 6 months, remote, overlapping with Tallinn hours. Budget up to €75 per hour. They will work with our Head of Payments. Must have shipped a PSP integration to production before.

That is enough to start matching today.