hiring

hiring is a skill for Claude Code from whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills. It costs 118 tokens per session (3,202 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for hiring and managing developers or technical contractors, including when you may not need to hire anyone. It explains how to define the work and judge candidates through communication, reliability, and results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write a technical hiring brief, choose between an employee and contractor, find candidates, vet their work, and manage the relationship.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of hiring someone who is cheap but creates expensive problems. It also helps compare hiring with contractors and AI tools.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the solo-founder-skills plugin — 54 skills, 1 command shipped together

Good fit Use it to write a technical hiring brief, choose between an employee and contractor, find candidates, vet their work, and manage the relationship.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring
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 whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills --skill hiring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install solo-founder-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 1 command.

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 hiring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring/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 hiring

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/hiring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,202 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 $0.00118 $0.03202
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01601
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00640
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00320

Measured 13d ago against content hash d4694a7a7310, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hiring 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 13d ago.

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/hiring/SKILL.md · 337 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 337 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hiring Technical Help

The most expensive developer is the cheap one who breaks things. This skill helps you decide when to hire vs. use AI tools, find and vet contractors, and manage the founder-developer relationship — even if you can't evaluate code yourself.

This skill is for hiring and managing technical people. For writing specs contractors can build from, use plan. For trying AI tools before hiring, use build. For legal contracts and IP protection, use legal.

Core Principles

  • Hire for the problem, not the role. Define what you need done before you look for who can do it.
  • A great contractor beats a mediocre full-time hire every time at this stage.
  • You can't evaluate code, but you can evaluate communication, reliability, and results.
  • The most expensive developer is the cheap one who breaks things. Budget for quality.
  • AI tools have moved the line. Many things that used to require hiring now don't.

When to Hire vs. When to Use AI Tools

You Do NOT Need to Hire If:

  • You need a landing page → Use Lovable, Framer, or Webflow
  • You need a CRUD app (create, read, update, delete data) → Use Claude Code, Lovable, or Replit
  • You need to integrate Stripe → Tell AI to do it (see payments)
  • You need basic auth → AI tools handle this well
  • You need UI polish → AI + design system handles 80% of this
  • You need simple bug fixes → Describe the bug to Claude Code

You DO Need to Hire When:

  • Complex integrations — Connecting to enterprise APIs with poor documentation
  • Performance at scale — Your app is slow under load and AI-generated fixes aren't working
  • Data migrations — Moving from one database or architecture to another
  • Security audit — You need someone to verify your AI-generated code is secure
  • Native mobile apps — AI tools are weaker here (improving, but still)
  • Infrastructure you don't understand — Something is broken in production and you can't debug it
  • Ongoing maintenance — You're spending more time fixing than building

Read the full file on GitHub · 337 lines

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. 13d ago First seen · 337 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A d4694a7a7310

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hiring is a skill published in the GitHub repository whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills (243 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 3,202 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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