GLOBALWORKS PRACTICAL RESOURCE
Start with the milestone. Then define the hire.
A working brief for founders, CTOs and hiring leaders. Use these questions to align the team before launching a specialist search. The examples are illustrative, not placement outcomes.
01 / DEFINE THE OUTCOME
What must become possible because this person joins?
Name the product or business milestone and the capability currently missing. For example, distinguish executing a test plan from owning verification strategy. Record the decisions the person will make, the interfaces they will manage and how the team will recognize progress. Avoid writing a list of every tool used anywhere in the company.
02 / SEPARATE ESSENTIAL FROM LEARNABLE
Challenge the wish list.
For each requirement, ask why it is necessary on day one and what evidence would demonstrate it. Separate core technical capability, product-stage experience and practical constraints. Identify which skills can be learned or supported by colleagues. A broad list can obscure the one capability that actually determines the hire.
03 / EXAMPLE ASSESSMENT
A Robotics Field Service Engineer for real deployments.
Business challenge
A deployed system needs disciplined fault diagnosis and clear feedback to engineering. Define travel, work environment and escalation responsibilities explicitly.
Evidence to explore
Ask for a structured account of a difficult failure: observations, hypotheses, safe testing, escalation and what changed afterward. Distinguish individual ownership from team outcomes.
What to validate
Use a relevant technical interview or work sample designed by the engineering team. Evaluate reasoning, documentation and communication. Do not request confidential work from a former employer.
04 / TEST ADJACENT POOLS
Transferable experience needs a reason.
Map direct employers first, then adjacent environments with comparable systems, constraints or engineering ownership. For each adjacent pool, state the transfer hypothesis and the gap to test. Industrial automation experience may be relevant to robotics deployment, for example, but it does not automatically establish competence on your platform.
05 / ALIGN THE DECISION
Agree how the team will assess the same evidence.
Assign each interviewer a defined area. Use consistent role-relevant questions and distinguish observed evidence from interpretation. Capture concerns, unresolved questions and practical alignment before making a decision. Hiring criteria should remain tied to the work; protected characteristics are not proxies for capability.
TAKE THIS INTO YOUR NEXT BRIEF
The six things to bring to a search conversation.
Bring the milestone, role outcomes, essential evidence, team context, location and compensation parameters. Note what has already been tried and where the search is getting stuck. These inputs create a more useful discussion than a title alone.
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WORK
Which hire moves your product forward?
We discuss the role, what makes the hire difficult, relevant market constraints and whether specialist search makes sense. Scope and commercial terms are agreed before work begins.
GLOBALWORKS
Specialist search for robotics, autonomy, advanced hardware and manufacturing. The people behind what comes next.
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