first-hires-playbook

first-hires-playbook is a skill for Claude Code from LeadMagic/gtm-skills. It costs 62 tokens per session (3,369 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to hiring a company's first ten employees outside sales, including engineers, customer-success staff, marketers, and product managers. It covers hiring timing, job descriptions, interviews, compensation, and offers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan early hiring, write job descriptions, design interviews, benchmark compensation, build a founding team, and make offers to the first employees.
Why use it?
It helps founders decide which roles to hire and create a consistent process for finding and evaluating early employees. This reduces the risk of hiring without clear responsibilities or expectations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the gtm-skills plugin — 196 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan early hiring, write job descriptions, design interviews, benchmark compensation, build a founding team, and make offers to the first employees.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add LeadMagic/gtm-skills --skill first-hires-playbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LeadMagic/gtm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gtm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 196 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for first-hires-playbook

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for first-hires-playbook

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/first-hires-playbook.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,369 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00062 $0.03369
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.01684
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00674
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00337

Measured 6d ago against content hash ece2f8b64f6a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

first-hires-playbook scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/check-output.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/founder-led/first-hires-playbook/SKILL.md · 315 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 315 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

First Hires Playbook

Overview

Your first 10 hires define your company's trajectory more than any product decision. The mistake: hiring generalists with "good vibes" instead of role-specific operators who can build the function from zero. This skill covers when to hire each critical first role, how to write job descriptions that attract builders (not corporate ladder-climbers), interview design, compensation, and offer construction.

Authoritative Foundations

  • SaaStr/Jason Lemkin — First VP hiring benchmarks — First VP hiring benchmarks
  • Elad Gil — High Growth Handbook (hiring executives) — High Growth Handbook (hiring executives)
  • Molly Graham — Giving away your Legos (scaling teams) — Giving away your Legos (scaling teams)
  • Patty McCord — Powerful (Netflix culture, hiring for density) — Powerful (Netflix culture, hiring for density)
  • Claire Hughes Johnson — Scaling People (Stripe COO) — Scaling People (Stripe COO)
  • First Round Review — Hiring playbooks — Hiring playbooks

When to Use

Trigger phrases: "first hire", "first engineer", "first CS hire", "hiring playbook", "founding team", "early hires", "when to hire marketing", "first product hire", "hiring timeline by ARR stage"

Hiring Timeline by ARR

Role When Why Then
Founding Engineer $0-500K Build product alongside you
First SDR $500K-1M Prove outbound repeatability
First AE $1-2M Founder transitions from selling
First CSM $1-2M Churn becomes math problem
First Marketer $2-4M Content engine needs owner
First Product Manager $3-5M You can't be PM + CEO anymore
Head of Engineering $3-5M ICs need technical leadership
VP Finance/Ops $5-10M Financial complexity demands it
VP People $10-20M 50+ employees needs people ops
First Data Analyst $3-5M Decisions need data, not gut

Step-by-Step Process

Phase 1: Role Definition

Every first hire solves a specific business constraint, not a general "we need help" feeling. Define the constraint first:

Read the full file on GitHub · 315 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 315 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A ece2f8b64f6a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

first-hires-playbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository LeadMagic/gtm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 3,369 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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