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Hiring Playbooks

A team-only library of the hiring material you reuse — documents and links, tagged so Kit surfaces them during stage setup and AI agents can read them.

Playbooks live under Hiring → Playbooks at /hiring/playbooks. A playbook is a named group of resources: markdown documents written inside Kit, and links to material that lives elsewhere.

Nothing in a playbook is ever shown to candidates. It is your team’s internal handbook — the career portal, candidate portal, and application emails never read from it.

An engineering team’s playbook might hold:

Resource Kind
Company intro video Link (YouTube — plays inline)
How we run the intro call Document
Code review checklist — backend Document
Culture-fit question bank Document
Onsite logistics (Google Doc) Link

Who can do what

Read Create, edit, delete, reorder
Hiring member Yes No
Hiring admin Yes Yes

Levels are per module, so a Hiring admin who is only a member in Outreach still has full write access here. See Team Roles.

A document is markdown you write in Kit. The editor has a Write / Preview toggle; headings, tables, task lists, strikethrough, and bare URLs all render. Raw HTML is dropped, not escaped. Bodies are capped at 100,000 characters.

A link is a URL to something you already keep elsewhere. Press Fetch preview and YouTube, Vimeo, and Loom links get an inline player; anything else saves as a plain link, which is the normal case for docs and wikis. There are no file uploads — put the file where it already lives and link to it.

Warning

A resource’s type is fixed once it is saved. A document cannot later become a link, or the reverse: switching would orphan the body and every version of it. To change type, create a new resource and delete the old one.

Admins can drag resources into order on the playbook page. Reordering is disabled while the filter box is in use, since a filtered list is a subset.

Suggestions during stage setup

When you add or edit a resource, tick stage types under Suggest during stage setup: Submit Application, Code Assignment, Interview, Offer, Portfolio Review, Questionnaire, Reference Check, Take-Home Task, Team Review, Video Introduction, Video Response.

A teammate opening a stage of that type then sees a From your playbook panel listing the tagged resources. Each opens in a new tab, so nothing unsaved on the stage is lost.

The panel has a dismiss button, and dismissal is narrow on purpose:

  • Per person. Hiding it never hides it for anyone else.
  • Per stage type. Hiding it on Interview stages leaves it showing on Code Assignment stages.
  • Reopened by anything added later. A resource tagged after someone dismissed the panel brings the panel back for that person. Silencing it once does not bury what the team writes next month.

Version history

Every save that changes a resource’s title, content, or URL writes a snapshot. The history panel sits beside the resource for people who can edit it: the six most recent versions, with older ones behind a toggle. Each entry names who saved it and which fields moved.

View opens a past version. Restore re-applies it — and restoring is a forward action: it writes a new version holding the old content rather than rewinding the trail. Nothing is erased, and you can restore your way back.

Deleting a resource deletes its history with it.

Finding a resource

Where What it matches
Filter box on a playbook page (appears above 8 resources) Substring of title, content, or URL
Cmd+K Playbook names and resource titles
hiring_search_playbooks (agents) Full-text, ranked, across titles, bodies, and playbook names

Search is keyword-based, not semantic — “debrief scoring” finds those words, not a paraphrase of them.

For AI agents

Four read-only tools. They need Hiring access and the connection’s Hiring read scope — nothing else. To connect a client, see AI Agent and MCP Tools.

Tool Returns
hiring_list_playbooks Every playbook with its resources by title, kind, id, slug, and stage types. No document bodies — this is the map.
hiring_get_playbook One playbook by pbk_ id or slug, with bodies truncated to 2,000 characters and flagged when truncated.
hiring_read_resource One resource by rsc_ id or slug, in full — the complete body, or a link’s URL.
hiring_search_playbooks Ranked matches with a highlighted snippet and the rsc_ id to follow up on. Snippets are excerpts.

Search or list first, then hiring_read_resource for anything you need complete. hiring_get_playbook reads a whole playbook at a glance, so its truncation makes it the wrong last call before an agent answers a detailed question.

Quick Checklist

  • One playbook per kind of hire, not one per team
  • Tag anything procedural with the stage types it applies to
  • Link out to material already maintained elsewhere; only write documents in Kit for things Kit is the home for
  • Get the type right the first time — it cannot be changed later
  • Ask your AI assistant a question you already know the answer to, to check it is reading the right resource

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