Hiring Playbook
Articles on Hiring Playbook from the CalHire team: verified skills, anonymous-first hiring, and audit-ready process.
Does your assessment predict anything? Validity for non-specialists
An assessment that feels rigorous can predict nothing. What validity and reliability mean, how to check yours, and the four ways hiring tests quietly break.
July 30, 2026
Why candidates get ghosted, and how to actually stop
Ghosting is almost never malice. It is what happens when closing the loop is optional, unowned and manual. The four structural causes, and the fix for each.
July 30, 2026
Dropping the degree requirement: what has to replace it
Removing a degree requirement without replacing the signal makes hiring more subjective, not less. What the degree was doing, and what to measure instead.
July 30, 2026
How to write rejection feedback that is actually useful
Most rejection feedback is either a form letter or a risk. How to write something specific and safe, using the scores you already have.
July 30, 2026
How to write a skills-based job description
Most job descriptions are a wish-list of proxies. How to write one around measurable skills, plus the language patterns that quietly shrink your applicant pool.
July 30, 2026
Structured interviews: the highest-return change most teams never make
Same questions, same order, same rubric, scored independently. Structured interviews are unglamorous, uncomfortable to adopt, and the best value in hiring.
July 30, 2026
Time-to-hire is a throughput metric. Quality-of-hire is the one that matters
Speed metrics are easy to collect and easy to game. How to measure whether your hiring decisions were any good, and which metrics to pair with which.
July 30, 2026
What skills-based hiring actually is (and what it is not)
Skills-based hiring decides on demonstrated ability, not proxies like degrees or job titles. What it means in practice, where it fails, and how to run it well.
July 30, 2026