From job post to offer: running your first hire on HireXAI

Most small teams don't have a hiring process. They have a shared inbox, a spreadsheet someone stopped updating in week two, and a WhatsApp group where the real decisions happen. This guide takes one open role through HireXAI from start to finish, so you can see what running it properly looks like — and how little of it you have to set up yourself.

1. Lay out the stages this role actually needs

Every job on HireXAI is a pipeline of stages, and you choose them per role. A new job starts with a sensible default — Applied, AI Screening, Assignment, Interview, Offer — and you rename, reorder, remove or add stages until it matches how you really hire for this position.

There are six stage types: screening, AI screening, assignment, interview, offer, and one you name yourself. Each carries its own settings. An assignment stage holds the brief and the submission window. An interview stage holds the mode, the length and the weekly times it can happen. Change the process as much as you like before anyone applies — it is free to do while nobody is standing in it.

2. Publish it where candidates will find it

The moment you register, your company gets a careers page with your logo and brand colour on it. Publish a job and it appears there, with Google for Jobs markup so it can surface in search, and in a job feed. If you have a website, paste one line of code and the same board shows up on your own domain.

When you share the job — on LinkedIn, in a WhatsApp group, in a newsletter — the link carries where it was posted. Every applicant then shows the source they came from, so after a month you know which channel actually brings people worth interviewing.

Candidates apply without creating an account or a password. They upload a CV, answer any questions you added to the job, and they're in. The CV is read into a profile your team can scan in seconds.

3. Let the AI take the first read

Every application gets an AI review against the job description: a match score, a short summary, the skills that match and the ones that are missing, and the reasoning behind the score. You still decide — the AI tells you who to open first, it does not reject anyone on its own.

If the role gets volume, add an AI screening stage. The AI calls the candidate, asks the questions you wrote, and scores them against the pass mark you set. The score and the full transcript land on the candidate, so a two-minute read replaces a thirty-minute phone screen.

4. Send the assignment, without chasing it

Move a candidate into the assignment stage and they get the brief and the deadline in one email, written from your template. HireXAI sends exactly one reminder before the deadline while there is still time to act on it, and their submission lands back on their profile. Nobody on your team has to remember to follow up.

5. Interviews candidates book themselves

For an interview stage, the candidate gets a link and picks a slot from the times you allowed — only slots where someone on the panel is actually free are offered. Connect Google Calendar and the interview goes onto the calendar with a Meet link, and the candidate and the interviewer both get the invite. No email thread of "does Tuesday work?".

After the interview, each interviewer fills a scorecard. They can't see a colleague's card until their own is in, so the panel gives you independent opinions instead of everyone agreeing with whoever spoke first.

6. Decide, and make the offer

The dashboard opens on one question: what needs a decision today. Verdicts waiting on you, candidates who have gone quiet, deadlines about to pass. Open a candidate and you see every round they have been through, who moved them and who interviewed them.

Move your pick to Offer, send it from your offer template, and move everyone else on with a rejection that sounds like you wrote it — because you did, once, in your template library.

What this costs

• Free: one public job and one internal job live at a time, 25 AI reviews a month, 15 minutes of AI screening to try, and two people on the team.
• Every new company gets 14 days of Growth first, so you can run a real hire with everything switched on.
• Sending from your own Gmail or Outlook address, the daily Slack summary and Google Calendar are free on every plan.

Bring one open role and run it end to end. If it doesn't beat your spreadsheet by the second week, you've lost nothing.