People & HR

How to track open roles as CPG Founders

People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're hiring a part-time demand planner, a co-packer coordinator, and a retail broker at the same time — and all three roles are tracked in a different place. One is a Notion page someone forgot to update, one is a LinkedIn message thread, and one is a sticky note on your monitor. You don't have an ATS because you're not hiring 40 people a year, but you're also losing candidates because you forgot to follow up for three weeks. Meanwhile your co-founder is interviewing for a role you already filled. CPG founders at 5–15 employees hire in bursts — new SKU launch, new distribution channel, new 3PL — and there's no system to show you what's open, who's in process, and what offer you made six months ago.

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People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A single live board showing every open role at your brand — warehouse lead, Amazon coordinator, field sales rep — with candidate stage, last contact date, and who owns the hire

Automated follow-up reminders so you stop losing candidates because you went heads-down on a retailer pitch for two weeks

A searchable record of past hires and offer terms so you're not starting from scratch when the same role opens again after someone leaves

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

Project Management Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Project Management and Task Manager run standalone — no external sync needed for the core hiring board. Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries it live) to pull in any existing job descriptions or offer docs you've already written. Connect Gmail so Starch syncs your email on a schedule and can surface the last time you emailed each candidate directly inside the board.

Prompts to copy

Create a project called 'Open Roles Q3 2026' with stages: Sourcing, Phone Screen, Working Interview, Offer Out, Filled. Add a card for 'Co-packer Coordinator — hired by August 1' and assign it to me.

Create a knowledge base doc called 'Hiring Templates' that stores our standard offer ranges by role type: warehouse, ops coordinator, field sales, and broker manager. Make it searchable by the whole team.

Remind me every Monday to check the 'Offer Out' column and follow up with any candidate who hasn't responded in 5 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Starch Project Management and create a new project called 'Open Roles' with five columns: Sourcing, Phone Screen, Working Interview, Offer Out, and Filled. Tell Starch: 'Create a hiring pipeline project with these five stages.'

2 Add a card for every role you're actively filling right now — even the ones you're 'casually' looking for. CPG hiring moves in bursts; getting everything visible in one place is the whole point. Include the target start date and which channel (FBA ops, co-packer, field sales) the role supports.

3 For each card, log the current candidate's name, where you found them (LinkedIn, referral, Indeed), and the last action you took. Starch connects Gmail on a scheduled sync, so if you've emailed them recently, that thread is surfaced automatically.

4 Set a recurring task in Task Manager: 'Every Monday, review anything in Offer Out or Working Interview and flag anyone I haven't contacted in 5 days.' Tell Starch: 'Remind me every Monday morning to follow up with open-role candidates who've gone cold.'

5 Create a Knowledge Management doc called 'Role Profiles' and store your standard job descriptions for the roles you hire most: warehouse associate, ops coordinator, Amazon/FBA coordinator, field sales rep, broker manager. These almost never change and you're rewriting them from scratch every time.

6 Add a second Knowledge Management doc: 'Offer History.' Log every offer you extend — role, comp range, equity if any, outcome (accepted, declined, ghosted). Two hires from now you'll thank yourself for this. Prompt: 'Create a doc called Offer History with a table: date, role, candidate name, base comp, outcome.'

7 When a role moves to Filled, drag the card to the Filled column and log the final offer terms in the Offer History doc. Archive the card so your board stays clean but the record stays searchable.

8 Before posting a new role, search your Knowledge Management base for the last time you hired for it. Pull the old job description, the comp range that closed, and what sourcing channel worked. Skip the 30 minutes of digging through email and Notion.

9 If you're sourcing on LinkedIn, Starch automates LinkedIn outreach through your browser — no API needed. You can build an automation that finds profiles matching your search criteria and queues outreach messages for your review before sending.

10 Use the Project Management workload view at the end of each week to see which roles have been stuck in the same stage for more than two weeks. Stalled roles are the ones you'll regret in six months when you're short-staffed during a seasonal peak.

11 When a co-founder or ops lead is also involved in hiring, assign cards to them directly in Project Management and set due dates for their next action. Prompt: 'Assign the Co-packer Coordinator card to Sarah, due this Friday for a phone screen.'

12 Once the system is running, tell Starch to generate a weekly hiring summary: roles open, candidates in pipeline, offers outstanding, hires this quarter. Share it in your Monday all-hands without manually pulling it together.

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

August 2026 hiring sprint — three roles open at once

Sample numbers from a real run

FBA Operations Coordinator	1
West Coast Field Sales Rep	1
Co-packer QA Coordinator	1

In early August 2026, you're launching in 400 new Sprouts doors in September and your FBA inventory has been mis-managed for two quarters. You open three roles simultaneously. Without a system, these live in three different places — one in a Notion doc your ops lead owns, one in a LinkedIn DM thread you started, and one you told your co-founder about verbally. With Starch: all three are cards in the Open Roles project. The FBA Ops Coordinator is in Working Interview with two candidates; last email contact was 4 days ago. The Monday reminder fires and you follow up before the candidate gets a competing offer. The Field Sales Rep card shows you found your last two field reps through referrals from your broker network, not Indeed — that's in the Offer History doc and saves you the $800 Indeed posting fee. The QA Coordinator role has been sitting in Sourcing for 11 days; the workload view flags it as stalled and you realize you never posted the job because the description was buried in a Google Doc. You pull it from Knowledge Management in 30 seconds, update the comp range to match your last offer, and post it the same day.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days-to-fill per role (especially for ops roles that block co-packer coordination or FBA management)

Candidate response rate after initial outreach — a proxy for how warm your sourcing channel is

Offer acceptance rate — if candidates are declining, your comp ranges are stale or your process is too slow

Number of roles open more than 60 days — for a 10-person CPG brand, one unfilled ops role is a real operational risk

Percentage of hires from referrals vs. job boards — CPG operator networks are tight; referrals close faster and cheaper

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Notion hiring tracker (DIY)

Notion is fine for docs but has no task assignment, no due-date reminders, and no Gmail sync — you'll still be manually checking it and still forgetting to follow up

Greenhouse or Lever

Full ATS tools built for companies hiring 50+ people a year — overkill for a CPG brand making 8–15 hires annually, and they don't connect to the rest of your ops stack

LinkedIn Recruiter

Good for sourcing but not a tracking system — you'll still need somewhere to manage stages, offer history, and follow-up reminders

Spreadsheet (Google Sheets)

Zero friction to start, but no reminders, no assignment, no search, and it's abandoned after the hiring sprint ends — you start from scratch every time

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — project management, knowledge management, task manager 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

Does Starch connect to job boards like Indeed or Greenhouse so candidates flow in automatically?

Greenhouse and similar ATS tools are reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent can query them live when your board needs the data. Indeed and other job board sites can be automated through your browser, no API required. That said, if you're hiring 8–15 people a year, you probably don't need full ATS integration. Most CPG founders at this stage are sourcing through LinkedIn, referrals, and their broker network — and the Project Management board handles tracking without adding another tool.

Can Starch actually send outreach messages to candidates on LinkedIn?

Yes. Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser — no LinkedIn API needed. You can build an automation that searches for profiles matching your criteria (e.g., 'operations coordinator, CPG or food & beverage, Los Angeles') and queues draft messages for your review before anything goes out. The LinkedIn Automation app in the App Store is the starting point for this.

What if my co-founder is running some of the interviews — can they see the same board?

Yes. Project Management is a shared workspace. You can assign cards, set due dates for their next action, and add comments. If your co-founder needs to complete a phone screen by Friday, you set the due date on the card and they get the reminder. No separate tool, no forwarded emails.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're putting candidate data in here including compensation details.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. That's worth knowing if your company has a formal data security policy that requires it. For most CPG founders at 5–20 employees, this isn't a blocker, but it's an honest answer and you should factor it into your decision.

We already have our job descriptions in Notion — do I have to move everything to Starch's Knowledge Management?

You don't have to move anything. Starch connects to Notion from its integration catalog and queries your existing pages live when an app needs them. You can keep writing in Notion and have Starch surface that content inside your hiring board. If you want AI-powered search and stale-content detection across your docs, Knowledge Management is the better long-term home — but migration is optional.

We only hire a few people a year. Is this overkill?

The setup takes about an hour. The payoff is that you stop losing candidates to follow-up delays (which is the most common reason small CPG brands lose good ops hires to better-funded competitors) and you stop rewriting the same job descriptions every time. At 5–15 people, every ops hire matters more than it does at 100 people. One unfilled FBA coordinator during a Q4 Amazon peak is a meaningful revenue problem.