People & HR

How to run an interview loop as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders5 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're hiring a senior consultant or project manager and suddenly you're coordinating five people's calendars, sending the same 'here's what to expect' email for the fourth time, manually tracking whether candidates sent their work samples, and trying to remember if you debriefed with your ops lead after the last round. There's no ATS built for a 12-person firm — Greenhouse and Lever are priced for HR departments, and Workday might as well be a different industry. So the hiring loop lives in a mix of Gmail threads, a Notion doc with notes, a Google Calendar invite chain, and your head. You lose candidates to slow follow-up. You forget who said what in which debrief. And it takes you personally to keep the loop moving.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders5 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured interview process — scheduling, note capture, and follow-up — that runs without you manually pushing each step forward

A searchable record of every candidate conversation, debrief decision, and action item so nothing lives only in someone's inbox

Automated coordination across your Google Calendar and Gmail so candidates get timely confirmations, reminders, and feedback without you writing each email

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scheduling Meeting Notes Email Agent Task Manager Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Google Calendar via scheduled sync to manage interviewer availability and booking pages. Gmail is connected via scheduled sync so the Email Agent can read candidate threads, draft replies, and track whether work samples have arrived. Notion is connected via scheduled sync so that hiring playbooks and debrief notes are stored and searchable in your existing workspace. Task Manager tracks open candidate actions inside Starch. Any candidate-facing booking confirmation or status-check page that doesn't have a direct API — such as a specific job board or background check portal — can be automated through your browser with no API required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a booking page for first-round interviews — 45-minute slots, Tuesday through Thursday, 10am to 4pm, with 15 minutes buffer before and after. Call it 'Initial Conversation — [Your Firm Name]' and include a short form asking candidates to describe a recent engagement they led.

After each candidate call ends, generate a structured debrief note: summary of the conversation, a section for 'fit signals' and 'concern flags', action items for next steps, and file it under a folder called 'Hiring — Senior Consultant 2026'.

When a candidate completes their first-round interview, draft a follow-up email thanking them, setting expectations for timeline, and asking for their work sample if we haven't received it yet. Flag it for my review before sending.

Create a task for every open candidate in the loop: label it P2, set a due date three business days from their last interview, and remind me if I haven't updated their status by then.

Build a one-page interview guide for the Senior Consultant role: what we're evaluating in each round, the questions each interviewer should cover, and how to score client-management judgment on a 1–4 scale. Store it in our Knowledge Base under 'Hiring Playbooks'.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar and Gmail in Starch (both sync on a schedule). This gives the Scheduling app live visibility into every interviewer's real availability — not a manually updated grid.

2 Use the Scheduling starter app to build a booking page for each interview stage. Set 45-minute slots for first rounds, 60-minute slots for case interviews, and configure buffer time between sessions so interviewers aren't back-to-back.

3 Tell Starch: 'When a candidate books a first-round slot, send them a confirmation email with the meeting link, the name of who they'll be speaking with, and a short prep note about our firm.' Starch drafts this via the Email Agent; you approve the template once.

4 Connect Notion via scheduled sync if that's where your interview rubrics or role specs live. Then prompt Starch to build an interview guide for the role — scoring criteria, per-round question banks, and what a strong answer looks like — and store it in Knowledge Management so every interviewer finds the same version.

5 After each interview, the Meeting Notes app transcribes the call, generates a debrief summary with key signals and flags, and extracts action items (e.g., 'request writing sample', 'schedule case round', 'send rejection'). No one needs to take notes during the conversation.

6 Task Manager creates a P2 task for each open candidate, due in three business days, with a reminder if status hasn't been updated. This replaces the mental overhead of tracking who's in which stage.

7 Set up an Email Agent automation: 'If a candidate email hasn't received a reply within 48 hours, flag it for me and draft a holding response.' Candidates at small firms often drop out due to silence — this keeps your response rate high without you monitoring the inbox.

8 After each debrief call, Starch stores structured notes in Knowledge Management under a per-candidate folder. When you're in a final decision meeting and someone says 'what did we think about her client communication in round one?' you search and find the exact debrief note.

9 Tell Starch: 'One week after a candidate's final round, if we haven't sent an offer or rejection, remind me with a summary of where they are in the process.' This catches the candidates who fall through the cracks during a busy delivery week.

10 Once you've run two or three loops, tell Starch: 'Summarize the hiring process we used for the Senior Consultant role — timelines, drop-off points, and what we learned about the rubric — and save it as a Hiring Retrospective in Knowledge Management.' Next time, you're starting from a documented playbook, not memory.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Senior Consultant Hire — March 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Candidates sourced (LinkedIn + referral)	14
First-round interviews scheduled via booking page	8
Case interviews completed	4
Work samples received (tracked by Email Agent)	3
Final-round debrief notes filed in Knowledge Management	4
Days from first contact to offer letter	19

In March 2026, you opened a search for a Senior Consultant to cover a new financial services retainer starting in May. You built a 45-minute booking page in Starch's Scheduling app — Tuesday through Thursday, 10am to 4pm, with 15-minute buffers — and shared the link in your LinkedIn outreach and with two referral sources. Eight candidates booked themselves in without a single 'when are you free?' thread. After each first-round call, Meeting Notes produced a debrief summary in under a minute: signals on client management, red flags on communication style, action items. Three candidates needed work samples; the Email Agent tracked which ones hadn't replied and sent a follow-up draft after 48 hours — you approved it with one click and all three responded. Four candidates reached the case round. The debrief notes from all four rounds lived in Knowledge Management, so when you and your ops lead sat down to make the final call, you pulled up the exact scoring for each candidate instead of relying on memory from two weeks prior. You sent the offer on day 19. The entire loop ran without a recruiting coordinator and without a single missed follow-up.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time-to-offer (days from first outreach to signed offer letter)

Candidate response rate to follow-up within 48 hours

Interviewer time per hire (hours of your calendar consumed per loop)

Drop-off rate by stage (how many candidates go dark between first and case round)

Debrief note completion rate (did every round produce a structured record before the next round started)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Greenhouse or Lever

Purpose-built ATS with structured pipelines, but priced and scoped for companies with dedicated HR staff — expect a multi-month implementation and a per-seat cost that doesn't make sense until you're hiring 10+ roles a year.

Calendly alone

Handles the booking page cleanly, but doesn't connect to your debrief notes, email follow-up, or candidate task tracking — you're still stitching four tools together manually.

Notion + Google Calendar + Gmail (manual)

Free and already in your stack, but the coordination is all on you — there's no automation watching for 48-hour non-replies or creating follow-up tasks after each stage.

Zapier + Calendly + Gmail

You can automate individual triggers (booking confirmation emails, task creation), but you're building and maintaining the logic yourself, and it breaks when any one service changes its schema.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, meeting notes, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We don't use a formal ATS — our candidate list is a Google Sheet. Can Starch still run this loop?

Yes. Starch can connect to Google Sheets from its integration catalog and query it live when an app or automation needs candidate data. You can tell Starch: 'Read our candidate tracker in Google Sheets and create a task for every candidate whose status is Interview Scheduled but who hasn't had their debrief note filed yet.' You don't need to migrate to a new system — Starch works on top of what you already have.

Does Starch record video calls, or is Meeting Notes just for in-person meetings?

Meeting Notes works from transcription — it captures what's said on calls, not the video itself. If your interviews happen over Zoom or Google Meet, you'll want to run transcription through those platforms first and bring the transcript into Starch. This is an honest limitation: Starch doesn't natively join video calls as a bot today. What it does well is structure the transcript once you have it — summarizing, extracting action items, and filing it in searchable history.

Our interview process changes depending on the role — we have a different rubric for a project manager than a senior consultant. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. Knowledge Management stores as many playbooks as you want, organized however you want. You can prompt Starch: 'Build an interview guide for the Project Manager role — three rounds, focused on delivery methodology in round one, stakeholder management in round two, and a 30-60-90 plan presentation in round three.' Each role gets its own guide; interviewers find the right one by searching.

Will candidates see 'Starch' or your firm's name when they get booking confirmations?

The booking page is yours to configure with your firm's name and branding. On the Gmail side, one honest thing to flag: the Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than yours — a Starch-verified client is on the roadmap. Emails you send through the Email Agent go from your own Gmail address, so the candidate experience is normal; the connector name only shows up in the OAuth authorization step on your end.

We sometimes use LinkedIn to source candidates. Can Starch help with outreach there too?

Yes. Starch's LinkedIn Automation app handles LinkedIn connection requests and message sequences through browser automation — no LinkedIn API required. You can run sourcing outreach from LinkedIn and then pick up the interview coordination in Starch once a candidate responds. The two workflows connect: a candidate who replies to a LinkedIn sequence can be added to your Google Sheet or Notion tracker, and the interview loop automation takes over from there.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We sometimes ask candidates to share sensitive documents.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's an honest limitation worth knowing. For a 12-person consultancy running a handful of hires a year, the risk profile is different than an enterprise, but you should make your own call on what candidate data you route through the platform versus keeping in your existing document store.