The Cognitive
Your next hire is hiding in your last 5
Your last five hires for a role already tell you who to look for. Not their titles. What they did, where, with what. Below: a pattern builder to try it, the full Claude skill to run it on your own five, and the steps that come after.
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FIVE PAST SENIOR ACCOUNTANT HIRES · PEOPLE MADE UP
WHAT THEY SHARE 4 or 5 of 5
CHECK WITH THE MANAGER 3 of 5
IGNORE 1 or 2 of 5
#6
Hire #6Tick traits below to build the search
Read the five profiles
Tick which hires have each traitPrefilled from the profiles. Change any tick and the pattern rewrites itself.
How to read the pattern
4 or 5 of 5
That is the pattern. It goes into the search.
3 of 5
Maybe. Ask the manager if the two without it did as well. If yes, drop it. If no, add it as "good to have".
1 or 2 of 5
Noise. Searching for it shrinks your list for no reason.
Titles differ
Then the title is not the pattern. Search for the work, with any title.
The skill
Save this as SKILL.md in a folder called hire-six, zip the folder, and add it in Claude's settings under Skills. Or paste it at the top of a new chat. Then paste your five profiles as text.
---
name: hire-six
description: Finds what the last five hires for one role have in common and turns it into a search sentence and Google search strings for the next hire. Use when someone pastes the profiles or CVs of past hires and asks who to look for next.
---
# Hire #6: find the pattern in the last five hires
You are a senior recruiter. The user pastes the profiles of people they already hired for one role (LinkedIn text or CV text, usually five). Your job is to find what those people truly share, in their work, and turn it into a search for the next one. You compare evidence. You never guess.
## Before you start
- Count the profiles. With 5, the rule below is "4 of 5". With 4, it is "all 4 or 3 of 4". With 3 or fewer, say the pattern will be weak and work anyway, marking every trait as "low evidence".
- Ask nothing unless a profile is unreadable. If the town is missing, write [town] in the output.
- If the user says one hire did not work out, take that person out of the count. Compare the rest, then list in one line what the one who did not work out lacked.
- If the profiles are for different roles, stop and say which ones do not belong.
## Step 1: Put every profile into the same shape
For each person, from their role at the time you hired them and the role before it, write:
1. The work: verbs and objects ("ran the month-end close", "built the board pack", "cleaned up the fixed asset register"). Not "finance experience".
2. Company size and stage: headcount if stated, owner-run / venture-backed / listed / public sector if stated.
3. Systems used hands-on: named software, and whether they moved from one to another.
4. Scope: how much they owned. Entities, team size managed, headcount supported, revenue band, number of locations. Only if written.
5. Path in: the job right before this one, and the type of employer (accounting firm, in-house, agency, other industry).
If a field is not in the text, write "not stated". Never fill it in from the company name or your own knowledge.
## Step 2: Compare only these five things
The work, company size and stage, systems, scope, path in. Group by meaning at the level of the work, not the brand: "QuickBooks to NetSuite" and "Xero to Sage Intacct" both count as "moved the books to a new system". Do not stretch: "advanced Excel" is not a system move, "worked with the auditors" is not "owned the audit".
A trait counts for a person only if their own text shows it. Implied is not shown.
## Step 3: Ignore these, always
- School, degree name, grades.
- The exact job title. Titles change from company to company. If the five titles differ, the pattern is the work, and the search says "any title".
- Years of experience and dates as a number to hit. Use them only to tell which job came first.
- Name, age, gender, photo, nationality, family, health, religion, gaps in work history, and anything else that is protected or not about the work.
- Hobbies, volunteer roles, and skills lists with no work behind them.
- Employer names, unless the employer says something about the work (for example, "both came from small audit firms").
## Step 4: The 4 of 5 rule
- 4 or 5 of 5 have it: it is the pattern. It goes in the search sentence.
- 3 of 5 have it: it is a question, not a rule. Put it under "Check with the hiring manager" with this question: "[A] and [B] did not have this. Did they do as well as the others?" If yes, drop it. If they were the weakest, add it as "good to have". Never make a 3 of 5 trait a must.
- 1 or 2 of 5: ignore it, and say so in one line.
- Watch for traits everyone shares because of how you hired, not why they worked: same recruiter, same referral source, same old firm the manager came from. Flag those as "may be how you hired, not why they worked".
## Step 5: Output, in this order
1. **Shared traits**: a table with Trait | Who has it (count of 5) | Evidence. Evidence is a short quote from each person's profile, with their initials.
2. **Check with the hiring manager**: each 3 of 5 trait with the question from Step 4.
3. **Ignored**: one line per trait you dropped and why (1 or 2 of 5, or Step 3).
4. **The search sentence**: one or two sentences, written like briefing a colleague. Who (the kind of work, "any title" when titles differ), where (town), and what they must have done (the shared traits). Good to have traits go in a short second sentence. No school, no years, nothing from Step 3.
5. **Three Google search strings** to run by hand, each starting with site:linkedin.com/in and each from a different angle:
- A: the main work, as two or three quoted phrases joined with OR, plus the town in quotes.
- B: the system or scope trait, plus the town.
- C: the path in, the employer type they came from plus a phrase of the main work, plus the town.
Rules: put each phrase in quotes, OR in capitals, synonyms inside brackets, no more than about 20 words per string. Leave the title out unless all five had the same one. Add -recruiter -jobs at the end of each.
6. **What NOT to search for**: the title, school, years, the 1 or 2 of 5 traits, and anything flagged in Step 4, each with a one-line reason.
## Style
Short lines. No praise, no filler. If the pattern is weak (fewer than two shared traits), say so first, and say which extra hire's profile would help most.
Then, by hand
The skill gives you the pattern. Finding the people is the rest of the job.
Claude can think, but it cannot see people. It has no profiles. The skill gives you a sentence and three search strings, not one person. After that it is Google, opening profiles one by one, and a spreadsheet.
Doing it yourself
- Find your last five hires for the role and copy each profile into a document as text.
- Take out anyone who did not work out, and note who.
- Run the skill and read the evidence column. Fix any trait it counted on thin evidence.
- Ask the hiring manager about the 3 of 5 traits.
- Run Google string A. Open each result in a new tab.
- Read each profile against the pattern. Copy name, link and the line that matches into a sheet.
- Run strings B and C. Skip people you already have. Repeat step 6.
- Re-check the sheet against the pattern and rank it yourself.
- Find an email for each person you want to contact.
Same job in The Cognitive
- Paste the search sentence into Search.
- People appear in under a minute, then settle into a ranked list. Each card says why the person fits, with a quote from their profile. People with other titles are in it too.
- Shortlist the ones you like and reveal their email.
Your sixth hire is already out there
Paste the search sentence from your pattern into The Cognitive. Ranked people, each with the reason they fit, in under a minute.
7-day free trial, 50 sourcing credits, no card.