People & HR

How to track open roles as Professional Services Founders

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

You're running 12 consultants across 8 active engagements and you genuinely don't know if you have bandwidth to take on the new prospect who emailed this morning. Your open roles — a senior analyst you've been trying to fill for three months, a part-time project coordinator, a contractor slot opening in six weeks — live across a Notion page, a LinkedIn Recruiter tab, and a Gmail thread you can't find. Candidates fall through because nobody owns follow-up. You only discover the role's been open 90 days when a team lead brings it up in a Monday standup. ATS tools built for 200-person firms want $400/month and a quarter of onboarding. You need one place that shows you what's open, what's moving, and what's stalled — tied to your actual headcount reality.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live open-roles tracker that shows every position, its status, owner, and days-open — pulled from your existing Notion pages and Gmail threads — with no manual updating required.

Automated candidate follow-up reminders that surface in your task list when an applicant goes 5+ days without a response, so roles don't stall because you got pulled onto a client fire.

A weekly hiring digest delivered to your inbox every Monday morning: roles open, pipeline by stage, and a flag for any candidate who's been sitting in the same stage for more than a week.

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 Task Manager Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Notion (scheduled sync) so your existing role and candidate pages are pulled in automatically on a recurring schedule. Gmail is synced on a schedule so recruiting threads and candidate correspondence surface as linked context inside each role card. HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live to cross-reference open headcount against active deal pipeline — so you can see whether you actually have the capacity to staff that new engagement before you sign the SOW. LinkedIn is reachable through browser automation — no API needed — for pulling candidate profile data or posting role updates directly from Starch.

Prompts to copy

Build me an open roles tracker with columns for role title, department, target start date, hiring owner, current stage (sourcing / screening / interviewing / offer / closed), days open, and notes. Pull existing role data from Notion and surface any Gmail threads tagged 'recruiting' as linked context.

Create a task for me every time a candidate has been in the same pipeline stage for more than 5 days — include the candidate name, role, and hiring owner in the task description, and mark it P2.

Build a knowledge base section for our hiring process: interview scorecard templates, the standard skills matrix for our analyst roles, onboarding checklist for new hires, and a running log of why we passed on candidates so we stop re-learning the same lessons.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Notion to Starch (scheduled sync). Starch pulls your existing role descriptions, hiring docs, and onboarding checklists automatically. You don't rebuild anything — it reads what's already there.

2 Connect Gmail to Starch (scheduled sync). Every recruiting thread — inbound applications, recruiter outreach, candidate follow-ups — becomes searchable and linkable inside your roles tracker.

3 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries your deal pipeline live so you can see revenue-weighted headcount need next to open roles — before you commit to hiring, not after.

4 Open the Project Management app and tell Starch: 'Build me an open roles tracker with role title, department, target start date, hiring owner, stage, days open, and notes.' Starch builds the board; you move candidates across stages like any kanban.

5 Set up a browser automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, check our open roles board, count candidates by stage for each role, and send me a Slack summary with any role that's been open more than 45 days flagged in red.' Starch automates this through your browser — no Slack API configuration required.

6 Turn on candidate-staleness alerts in the Task Manager: 'Create a P2 task assigned to the hiring owner whenever a candidate sits in the same stage for more than 5 business days.' You stop losing candidates to benign neglect during busy client weeks.

7 Use the Knowledge Management app to centralize your hiring process: interview scorecards, the skills matrix you use for analyst roles, compensation bands, and your standard offer letter template. New hiring managers stop emailing you asking where things live.

8 Build a capacity-check automation: 'Before I post a new role, query HubSpot for deals in late-stage pipeline (stage 4+), calculate implied headcount need based on deal size and our average engagement staffing ratio, and compare against current open roles.' You stop hiring reactively.

9 Use browser automation to post approved role descriptions to LinkedIn and your careers page: 'Take the finalized JD from Notion, post it to our LinkedIn company page, and confirm the post URL back to me.' No copy-pasting, no switching tabs.

10 Set a monthly automation: 'On the last Friday of each month, pull all roles closed this month, average days-to-fill by role type, and add a row to our hiring log in Notion with that data.' You start building the institutional memory to hire faster next cycle.

11 When a candidate accepts an offer, trigger the onboarding path in Knowledge Management: 'Create an onboarding checklist for [name], starting [date], in the [practice area] team — pull from our standard analyst onboarding template and assign tasks to their manager.'

12 Review the weekly Monday digest, close stalled roles or escalate to the hiring owner, and use the board as your single source of truth when the team asks 'where are we on the analyst search?'

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

Q2 2026 Hiring Push — April Snapshot

Sample numbers from a real run

Senior Consultant (open 67 days)	67
Project Coordinator, part-time (open 22 days)	22
Contractor slot, data practice (opening June 1)	0
Candidates in active pipeline across all roles	11
Candidates stalled 5+ days without follow-up	4

It's April 14th. The Senior Consultant role has been open 67 days — you only know that because Starch flagged it in Monday's digest with a red marker. Four of your 11 active candidates across all three roles have gone more than 5 days without a response; Starch has already created P2 tasks in the Task Manager for each one, assigned to the practice lead who owns recruiting for that role. The project coordinator search has a strong candidate who interviewed last Thursday but hasn't heard back — that task is on your list this morning. Meanwhile, HubSpot shows two deals in stage 4 totaling $380K in projected Q3 revenue. Starch's capacity check flagged that both engagements would require a senior-level resource starting in July — which means the 67-day-open role isn't just an HR problem, it's a revenue risk. You pull up the open roles board, confirm the senior consultant search is the priority, and use the browser automation to repost the updated JD to LinkedIn in 90 seconds. The Monday digest has turned a chaotic, multi-tab hiring process into a 15-minute weekly review.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days-to-fill by role type (analyst vs. senior consultant vs. contractor) — your benchmark is 45 days; anything over 60 is a capacity risk

Candidate response rate and average days-in-stage — a proxy for whether your hiring process is actually moving or just creating the appearance of activity

Open headcount as a percentage of total team — you need to know if you're at risk of turning down revenue because you can't staff it

Offer acceptance rate — at 12 people, losing a finalist after a two-month search costs you a quarter, not just a few weeks

Onboarding task completion rate at 30 days — whether new hires are actually ramping or just getting lost because nobody documented the process

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Greenhouse or Lever

Full ATS with structured pipelines and reporting, but starts around $6K/year, takes 6–8 weeks to configure properly, and adds yet another tool your hiring managers won't log into consistently.

Notion + Google Sheets (your current stack)

Free and flexible, but there's no automated staleness detection, no connection to your deal pipeline, and the 'hiring tracker' spreadsheet is always two weeks out of date because updating it manually loses the race against client work.

Rippling or Gusto (HR platform)

Strong for payroll and benefits compliance once someone's hired, but the recruiting module is lightweight and it doesn't connect your open roles to revenue pipeline or your existing Notion knowledge base.

LinkedIn Recruiter

Good for sourcing, but it's a sourcing tool — it doesn't track your internal pipeline, doesn't integrate with your capacity planning, and the per-seat cost is hard to justify for a 12-person firm running one or two searches at a time.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — project management, task manager, knowledge management 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 already track roles in Notion. Do I have to rebuild everything in Starch?

No. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule — pages, databases, users. You describe what you want the tracker to look like, and Starch builds a view on top of what's already in Notion. You're not migrating; you're adding a smarter surface on top of the source of truth you already maintain.

Can Starch pull in candidate emails from Gmail automatically?

Yes. Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule, so recruiting threads are searchable and can be linked to role cards inside your tracker. You can ask Starch to surface any thread mentioning a candidate's name or a specific role, or to flag threads that haven't had a reply in more than five days.

We use LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing. Can Starch work alongside that?

Yes. Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser — no API needed — so it can pull candidate profile data, check message thread status, or post a role update to your company page. It doesn't replace LinkedIn Recruiter's sourcing database, but it does mean you're not manually copying information between LinkedIn and your tracker.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We sometimes have sensitive compensation data in our hiring docs.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your firm has clients with strict vendor security requirements that extend to your internal tooling, that's worth factoring in. It's an honest limit, and the team knows it's on the roadmap.

What happens when a role closes and the candidate data is no longer relevant?

You can archive the role in the tracker and Starch will stop surfacing it in your active pipeline views. The underlying Notion page stays wherever you keep it. You can also ask Starch to log a summary of the closed search — time-to-fill, source of hire, why finalists were passed — into your Knowledge Management base so you have institutional memory for the next time you hire for that role type.

We're only hiring one or two people at a time. Is this overkill?

At 12 people, one bad hire or a 90-day-open senior role is a material business problem, not just an HR inconvenience. The value isn't in managing high-volume recruiting — it's in making sure a role doesn't silently stall for two months while you're heads-down on client delivery. That's a workflow problem Starch is sized correctly to solve.