Clever Recruiting · hiring worksheet

What founder-led hiring costs you this quarter

Three numbers decide whether to keep running hiring yourself or hand off the process: your capacity gap, your hours priced at what they are worth elsewhere, and what the roles cost while they stay open. Change the figures to yours.

Your numbers

Your real run-rate, not the plan.
Spent on product, fundraising or a key customer instead.
A slipped release, a commitment you cannot make, a team blocked on one person. An order of magnitude is enough.
Benchmarks used — adjust if yours differ
Gem 2026, across 1.2 million hires.
About 29 a year, per Gem.

The arithmetic

Your capacity gap

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You0
Recruiter0
The plan0

Your hours, priced

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The roles staying open

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Against a recruiter for the quarter

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One caveat this calculator cannot price. The math breaks if your bar is not defined yet. Buying speed before you know what "good" looks like gets you to the wrong hire faster.

If you have never hired this role: run five to ten interviews yourself, write down what separated the ones you would hire from the ones you would not, and hand off after that.

From the Clever Recruiting newsletter, When should a founder recruit themselves — and when should they stop? We work with founders at exactly this point: the hiring plan has outgrown the founder's calendar, but the bar still has to be theirs. clever-recruiting.com

  • Interview hours and recruiter output: Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (1.2m hires).
  • Delay is costed for one open role at a time, which understates a multi-role plan.