UNLOCKED
Hi there, welcome to the first issue of Unlocked. Once a month, one hiring insight, one real piece of work, no waffle. Two minutes, tops.
The one thingHire slow at the top, fast at the bottom.
So where does that £40k come from? Not the salary. It's the recruitment fees paid twice, the three months of nothing while the seat sits empty again, the customers who felt the wobble, and the year of management time spent unpicking it all. That's the real bill for one wrong senior hire, and most founders never sit down and total it up.
The fix costs nothing: reverse your speed. Most of us rush the senior hire because the pain is loud, then dawdle on the junior ones. Wrong way round. Your first senior hire sets the culture, the pay bands and half your future problems, so that's the one to slow down on. Save the speed for lower down, where mistakes are cheap and fixable.
Steal my first ten hires sequence →
Every hire you make right now is a ticking compliance clock.
Here's what founders are typing into Google, and asking their AI of choice, this month:
Fair questions, because the answer bites. From 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops to just six months, and the cap on compensation is being scrapped completely. Put those two together and someone you hire this month reaches full, uncapped legal protection on day one of 2027. Misjudge a dismissal after that and there's no ceiling on the tribunal award. For an SME that's not a fine, that's the company.
Quick win · tap to unlock the Month 5 Trigger
The Month 5 Trigger. For anyone you bring on this summer, put a formal, documented review meeting in the diary now for November or December 2026, month five of their employment. If the hire's working, brilliant, the review becomes a development chat. If it's not, you act cleanly and fairly before the six month window closes, while you still can.
The diary entry costs you nothing today. Not having it could cost you an uncapped award in 2027. Get your probation process ready for 2027 →
Shipped this month: a staff handbook people actually open.
A growing Scottish clean energy developer needed their people policies sorted before headcount ran ahead of them. The usual answer is an 80 page Word document that gets read once, at gunpoint, during induction. We didn't do that. And after the section above, you can see why that approach is about to age badly.
What they got instead: 33 policies as a private, interactive web page. Sections open on a click. A search box finds "maternity" or "expenses" in a second, on a phone, on site, in the middle of a conversation.
Why a living handbook beats a printed one · tap
Look at the section above. Employment law is about to change more in eighteen months than it has in a decade, and every change means a policy edit. With a Word document that means reissuing the file, chasing everyone to bin the old copy, and hoping nobody's working from version 1.2 when it matters. With a living handbook I update one file and everyone sees the current version the same day. One source of truth, a proper version history, and if you ever end up in front of a tribunal you can show exactly what the policy said and when your people had access to it. That's the difference between a document and a defence.
And why interactive matters · tap
Simple: people don't read handbooks, they use them. Nobody reads 80 pages, but everyone will type "holiday" into a search box the moment they need an answer. Sections that open on a click show staff the three lines that answer their question instead of a wall of text, so they actually get the answer. And they stop asking you. Every question the handbook answers is a question that never lands on your desk. A policy only protects you if people can find it, and being used is what turns paper compliance into real compliance.
Same compliance backbone underneath, CIPD built, current to 2026 employment law and ready for whatever 2027 brings. It just behaves like something made this decade.
What's your biggest people headache right now?
One tap. Results in Issue 02.
I take a fixed number of free, in person, Founder support conversations each quarter, so each one gets the full read rather than a rushed one. Thirty minutes on your people setup, no pitch, you leave with a plan either way.
Claim a seat →Seats left this quarter · tap to see
seats left for free, in person, Founder support conversations this quarter.
When they're gone, the next opening is October. Claim one →
That's Issue 01. This one lives on the web, but the email lands first. If a founder forwarded you here, connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll add you to the list.
Until next month,
Craig
Craig Jackson · Founder, Chiron Human Capital · CIPD