The Academy, installed.

23 lessons of method — the three-part JD audit, the four screening question types, structured interview design grounded in Sackett 2022, the five Paper Tiger patterns, career pattern analysis, outreach that strips AI tells, the structured hiring manager brief — compiled into a Claude skill that activates automatically whenever you mention a hiring task.

You type what you need. The Academy's methods get applied. No template switching, no remembering which lesson covered what, no translating the curriculum into prompts before every task. The whole curriculum becomes muscle memory for Claude, so every hiring response reflects how the work is actually done well.

What it Looks Like in Practice?

Five scenarios from a real recruiter's week, with and without the skill installed.

1. Monday morning. 47 applications came in over the weekend.

"I've got 47 resumes for the Senior PM role. Here's the JD. Which ones should I actually read carefully?"

The skill reads each resume for career story — trajectory, intentionality, adaptability, context fit — not for keyword match. It runs a Paper Tiger check across the five inflation patterns. It surfaces candidates whose backgrounds don't match the JD keywords but whose careers suggest they'll perform.

You get a ranked shortlist with explicit reasoning per candidate, including three non-standard picks the keyword filter would have rejected and two Paper Tiger risks with specific verification questions for the phone screen.

Without the skill, Claude produces a competent but generic summary — three bullet points per candidate, keyword-biased, no flagged risks. With the skill, you get the same kind of read a thoughtful senior recruiter would produce if they had four hours to study the batch.

Applying Lesson 11 (reasoning over matching) and Lesson 10 (Paper Tiger detection).

2. Phone screen in 45 minutes. The candidate claims they "led a Snowflake migration."

"Phone screen with Priya in 45 min. Senior Data Engineer role. Her resume says she "led a 40TB Snowflake migration at her last company." What should I ask?"

The skill generates six probing questions tied specifically to her stated accomplishment. "What was the hardest decision during the migration? Walk me through the first week. What surprised you about the data model once you got in? If you did it again, what would you do differently?" Each question comes with what it's testing and what to listen for in a strong answer.

If she led the migration, her answers will have texture — specific decisions, specific trade-offs, specific regret. If she inflated the claim, they'll have fog.

Applying Lesson 13 (screening questions that reveal potential).

3. Intake meeting just ended. The hiring manager said "I'll know them when I see them."

"Just finished intake with our VP of Engineering for a Staff Eng role. Notes: "senior, scalable systems, been-there-done-that, culture fit." Help me turn this into a real brief."

The skill produces a structured intake brief — role responsibilities, must-haves separated from nice-to-haves, 6-month success metrics — and, critically, a list of ambiguities the VP needs to resolve before sourcing starts.

What does "senior" mean — 8 years or 15? What does "scalable systems" mean in your context — 10K requests per second or 10M? What's one past hire who exemplified "been-there-done-that" we can calibrate against?

These are the questions that matter, and you ask them in a 10-minute follow-up conversation instead of discovering the misalignment three weeks in, when candidate six gets rejected for a reason that wasn't in the brief.

Applying Lesson 16 (hiring manager alignment) — specifically the discipline of forcing ambiguities to the surface.

4. Rejecting a strong candidate for a close reason.

"Need to reject Marcus for the Marketing Director role. He was great in final round but we went with someone with more scope. Don't want to burn the bridge."

The skill produces a direct, warm rejection that names one specific thing he did well in the process, the specific reason for the pass, and a real path forward — "when we next open a VP Marketing role, I'd want to revisit" — instead of hollow "please reapply" boilerplate.

Under 120 words. No over-apologizing. No AI tells. Reads like a person wrote it, not a template.

Applying Lesson 15 (candidate communication in the AI era).

5. Sourcing when the obvious pool is saturated.

"Hiring a VP of Engineering for a 40-person Series B fintech. Every VP of Engineering I reach out to is getting 20 other messages. Where else should I look?"

The skill ignores the obvious "search for more VPs of Engineering" advice. It maps five non-obvious pools instead. Senior Engineering Directors at 500+ person companies who've been doing the VP job in everything but title. Technical founders whose startup sold. Principal Engineers at FAANG who've capped out on scope and want a bigger canvas. Engineering Managers at post-IPO companies approaching their cliff.

For each pool: the titles to search, the stage of company where these candidates are common, the signal that distinguishes high-potential candidates in the pool, and the likely reason they'd be open to a move.

Applying Lesson 9 (sourcing candidates your competitors miss).

Installing it

Two minutes, no coding, works on every Claude plan.

1. Go to [claude.ai](https://claude.ai) → click your profile icon (top right) → "Settings"
2. Under "Capabilities", make sure "Code execution and file creation" is toggled on
3. Navigate to "Customize → Skills" in the left sidebar
4. Click the "+" button → "Create skill"
5. Upload the `hiring-craft.zip` file linked at the end of this article
6. Toggle the skill on in your Skills list

That's it. Start a new Claude conversation and type any hiring-related request. The skill fires automatically — no slash commands, no manual invocation.

On Team and Enterprise plans, your organization owner may need to enable Skills at the org level first. If you don't see the Skills option in Customize, ask whoever administers your Claude workspace. Enterprise owners can also provision the skill organization-wide so every recruiter on the team has it installed by default.

What's Covered?

Ten workflows, which together account for the hiring work a recruiter actually does in a week:

1. Job description audits and drafting — three-part audit for requirements inflation, jargon, and biased language
2. Phone screening questions — for the recruiter-led first conversation, 30-minute format, designed to surface signal before a full loop
3. Competency-specific interview questions — for a hiring manager or panel interviewer's specific slot, tuned to the competency being assessed
4. Structured interview loop design — question set, behavioral-anchored scorecard, and structured debrief template
5. Interviewer coaching briefs — concise slot-specific briefs for panel interviewers, under 300 words, what to listen for and what the red flags are
6. Resume analysis — career pattern assessment plus Paper Tiger risk check with verification questions for each flag
7. Candidate outreach — under 400 characters, specific personalization, no AI tells
8. Rejection emails — direct, warm, specific, no hollow reapplication lines
9. Sourcing maps — adjacent-title boolean strings plus non-obvious candidate pool maps
10. Hiring manager alignment — intake meeting prep questions and the post-meeting structured brief that surfaces ambiguities

The skill also pushes back when a request would produce bad outcomes — screening on protected characteristics (hard refuse), unstructured interview designs where structured ones work better, "AI writing detection" by language style (unreliable and penalizes non-native speakers), dishonest outreach. Those limits are deliberate.

Using the Skill and the Academy Together

The skill applies the methods at speed. The Academy explains why they work. Use both.

For routine tasks — the 15 JDs, 30 phone screens, and 20 rejections you'll work through this month — the skill is enough. You type what you need, the output reflects what good looks like, you ship it.

For the judgment calls — when to override the skill's suggestion, when a candidate who pattern-matches to a Paper Tiger might actually be the right hire, when to break from structured interviewing for a specific reason — the Academy's underlying reasoning is what you draw on. The skill won't make those calls for you. But it gives you consistently better inputs to make them with.

Most recruiters who install the skill notice the difference within a week. The output quality is different enough that the time you were using to patch generic AI drafts becomes available for the work that actually moves hiring outcomes.

Get the Skill

Download: [hiring-craft.zip](./hiring-craft.zip)

Install it. Try one real task from tomorrow morning. See what changes.

If your organization has governance that restricts custom skills, share this lesson and the skill file with whoever administers your Claude workspace — the skill is free, the SKILL.md is inspectable, and provisioning it takes a few minutes for an admin.

Questions, suggestions, or tasks you'd want the skill to cover that it doesn't? The Academy evolves with its readers. Reach out through [agentr.global/academy](https://agentr.global/academy).

Next: Lesson 22 — The AI Hiring Glossary