People & HR

How to track open roles as DTC Brand Founders

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're hiring your first warehouse coordinator, a part-time social media person, and a customer service rep all at once — and your 'hiring tracker' is a Google Sheet with color-coded cells that three people have edited without telling each other. You don't know which roles are live on Indeed, which candidates ghosted after the first call, or whether the job description you posted last month still matches what you actually need. Between Shopify fulfillment firefights and Meta Ads tweaks, recruiting falls off until you're desperate. By then you're paying a recruiter 20% or scrambling on LinkedIn yourself. There's no system — just a founder doing five jobs and forgetting the sixth.

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People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A central open-roles tracker that shows every active and draft position, stage, candidate count, and hiring owner — updated without a weekly sync meeting

A Knowledge Management hub that stores job descriptions, interview scorecards, and onboarding docs so the answer isn't always 'ask the founder'

A task layer that turns next steps from candidate conversations into assigned, due-dated tasks before you close your laptop

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

Knowledge Management Project Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Project Management and Task Manager run on Starch's own database — no external sync needed. Knowledge Management connects to Notion (Starch syncs your Notion pages on a schedule) so existing docs auto-import, and to Google Drive from Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries it live when you search for a file). LinkedIn candidate research is handled through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a hiring tracker with columns for role title, department, hiring owner, current stage (Draft / Sourcing / Interviewing / Offer / Filled / Paused), number of active candidates, target start date, and notes. I want a Kanban view by stage and a list view sortable by target start date.

Create a Knowledge Management space for hiring. Add sections for: active job descriptions, interview question banks by role, our hiring process overview, offer letter templates, and a 30-60-90 day onboarding checklist for ops hires.

Create a task for me to follow up with the warehouse coordinator candidate from Monday's call — due tomorrow, P1, tagged 'hiring'.

Show me all tasks tagged 'hiring' that are overdue or due this week.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open the Project Management app and tell Starch: 'Build me a hiring tracker with columns for role, department, hiring owner, stage, active candidate count, target start date, and notes — Kanban by stage, list view sortable by start date.' Starch builds it in under a minute.

2 Add every open role you're actually trying to fill right now. Be honest about stage — 'Draft' is fine. The point is to get it out of your head and into one place your ops or EA can also see.

3 Connect Notion from the scheduled-sync list so Starch pulls in any hiring docs you've already written — job descriptions, past scorecards, old onboarding guides.

4 Tell Starch to set up a Knowledge Management space for hiring: job descriptions, interview question banks, your process overview, offer templates, and a 30-60-90 onboarding checklist. Paste in or dictate whatever you already have; Starch organizes and categorizes it.

5 For every candidate conversation you complete, open Task Manager and say 'create a task to follow up with [name] about [role], P1, due [date].' Takes five seconds; nothing falls through after a busy Shopify drop day.

6 Each week, review the Kanban board in the hiring tracker. Move stalled roles to 'Paused' with a note so you're not lying to yourself about pipeline.

7 When a job description changes — and it will, because your Q3 warehouse needs are not your Q1 warehouse needs — update it in Knowledge Management. Starch flags docs that haven't been touched in 60 days so stale JDs don't stay live.

8 When you bring on a new interviewer (a department lead, a co-founder, an advisor doing a culture call), point them to the Knowledge Management space instead of writing a Slack novel explaining your process.

9 Use browser automation to pull candidate profiles from LinkedIn when you don't have a formal ATS: 'Find the LinkedIn profile for [name], grab their last three roles and current location, and add it as a note to the warehouse coordinator card.'

10 When a role is filled, move it to 'Filled' in the tracker, archive the job description in Knowledge Management (don't delete — you'll hire again), and generate a 30-60-90 task list for the new hire's first week using the onboarding template.

11 Before your next board update, tell Starch: 'Summarize hiring status — how many roles are open, which are in final stages, and which are stalled — and give me a one-paragraph update I can paste into the investor deck.' Starch pulls from the tracker and drafts it.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Hiring Push — Three Roles, One Founder, No Recruiter

Sample numbers from a real run

Warehouse Coordinator (Fulfillment)	1
Part-Time Social Media Contractor (Marketing)	1
Customer Service Rep (Ops)	1

It's April and you need to staff up before the summer peak. You have three open roles, zero formal process, and a Google Sheet that stopped being accurate in February. You spend 20 minutes with Starch: build the hiring tracker, import your existing Notion job descriptions for two of the three roles (Starch syncs Notion on a schedule and pulls them in automatically), and draft a new JD for the social media contractor by telling Starch 'write a part-time social contractor job description for a DTC brand — 10-15 hours/week, Instagram and TikTok focus, $30-40/hr, remote.' The tracker goes live. Your ops lead gets access and immediately moves the warehouse coordinator to 'Interviewing' with four active candidates noted. You do a 45-minute LinkedIn search session — Starch automates the profile pulls through browser automation so you're not copy-pasting manually — and add six contractors to the social media pipeline. By end of week, every role has an owner, a stage, and a next-action task. Two weeks later the warehouse coordinator role is filled. You pull the onboarding checklist from Knowledge Management, assign the 30-60-90 tasks to yourself and the new hire's manager, and close the card. No recruiter fee. No dropped follow-ups.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to fill per role (from 'Sourcing' to 'Offer Accepted')

Number of active candidates per open role at any given time

Roles stalled in one stage for more than 14 days

Overdue hiring follow-up tasks (should be zero on Monday mornings)

Onboarding task completion rate for new hires in their first 30 days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Lever or Greenhouse

Purpose-built ATS with strong candidate pipeline features, but starts at $4,000–$6,000/year and is overkill for a DTC brand hiring 3-8 people annually — you'll spend more time configuring it than filling roles.

Notion hiring tracker (DIY)

Free and flexible, but you build and maintain the schema yourself, there's no task layer, and it doesn't connect to your other ops data without manual exports.

Google Sheets + LinkedIn

Zero cost and zero structure — works until two people edit the same row and you lose a candidate because nobody followed up.

Rippling or Gusto (HR module)

Great once someone is hired and on payroll, but the recruiting workflow is thin and you're paying for a full HR platform when you only need a hiring tracker right now.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, project 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 LinkedIn Jobs so I can post roles directly?

Posting directly to Indeed or LinkedIn Jobs isn't a native scheduled sync. What Starch can do is automate browser-based actions on those sites — for example, checking which of your listings are still active or pulling candidate data from LinkedIn profiles — through browser automation, no API needed. For the actual job post, you write the description in Starch's Knowledge Management space and paste it to the boards yourself; Starch keeps the master description current so you're not copy-pasting a stale version.

I already use Notion for docs. Do I have to rebuild everything in Starch?

No. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule — pages, databases, users. Your existing hiring docs, scorecards, and process notes import automatically. You can keep writing in Notion if you prefer and let Starch surface the content via AI search; or migrate the hiring docs into Starch's Knowledge Management and let Notion hold everything else. Either way works.

We're not hiring formally right now — just occasional contractors. Is this overkill?

The same tracker works for contractors. Change the stage labels to match your reality: 'Scoping,' 'Trial,' 'Active,' 'Inactive.' The point is getting it out of your head. A five-row tracker you actually look at beats a 50-row ATS you ignore.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'd be storing candidate info here.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your legal or HR policy requires SOC 2 for storing candidate PII, that's worth knowing before you put sensitive data in. For a DTC brand tracking 10-20 candidates at a time with role and stage info, most founders find this is fine in practice — but it's your call to make.

Can I use Starch to manage the whole onboarding process, not just the hiring tracker?

Yes. The Knowledge Management app is where you store onboarding docs and 30-60-90 plans. The Task Manager or Project Management app handles the task side — 'create an onboarding task list for [new hire name], starting [date], based on our ops onboarding template' generates assigned, due-dated tasks from your stored template. You won't need a separate onboarding tool for a team of 2–15 people.

What if the role changes after I write the job description — like I realize I need a different skill set mid-search?

Update the JD in Knowledge Management and tell Starch to flag that the version posted externally may be out of sync. Starch's Knowledge Management detects stale docs — anything untouched for 60+ days surfaces for review. It won't automatically update your Indeed post, but it keeps your internal source of truth current so you're not interviewing people for a job that no longer exists.