Playbooks 03 through 06
A company posting a senior full-time hire is broadcasting a problem out loud. Most operators read the headline, they need a Head of Marketing, and walk straight past it.
There are at least four different ways that same posting is a conversation for you, each one with its own angle, its own person to reach, and its own message. One LinkedIn jobs page is quietly holding four playbooks at once, and most people walk straight past all of them, because the only story they can see in a job advert is the one printed in the headline.
03 / Fractional Fit
They are hiring full-time for work you could deliver in two or three days a week. Their search takes ninety days. You can start in two.
04 / Sideways Opportunity
They hired a Head of X. They almost certainly need a Head of Y too. They just have not named it yet.
05 / Leadership Gap
They are hiring a Manager into a function with no senior leader above them. The CEO knows it. They are hiring at the wrong level to save money.
06 / Outsource or Automate
They are hiring junior or admin headcount for repeatable work a process, service, or tool could do for less.
Shared hunt surface
All four hiring playbooks run on the same underlying pipeline: monitoring, the agency strip, expansion, contact finding, the address waterfall, and the send-log-follow-up routine. That machinery is specified once, honestly and in full, in the tradecraft chapter at the back of this book. These chapters stay focused on the judgement that is specific to each angle, so when a step below names a tradecraft stage, that is where to find it.
What is still playbook-specific is classification. For each keeper, force an angle before you write anything. Ask: is this my function at senior level with no team yet (03)? Is this an adjacent senior hire with my function missing (04)? Is this a manager hire with no senior cover (05)? Is this junior repeatable work (06)? If none fit, skip. Speed comes from ruthless skips, not from clever messages on bad targets.
A weekly rhythm that survives delivery
Use the tradecraft cadence: Monday and Thursday monitor blocks (45 minutes each), then pipeline blocks for expand, people, waterfall, and write. Cap researched sends at four to six a day so each note has a real observation. Replies get same-day attention. A hiring signal goes cold when the search moves.
Steady state is about 90 minutes of watch plus about 45 minutes per live target (tradecraft arithmetic). Five researched sends in a week is roughly five and a quarter focused hours. It is not nothing. It is also not a second full-time job unless you refuse to skip bad targets.
What “good” looks like after thirty days
You are not aiming for a hundred sends. You are aiming for a short list of conversations where the other person already admitted the problem in public by posting a role. A solid first month on one hiring angle looks like: forty to sixty postings screened, twelve to eighteen notes sent, three to six replies, one to three real meetings. The numbers move with market and offer strength. What should not move is the standard: no note without a named observation, no spray sequence, no Easy Apply cosplay.
~270 hrs / year. All four hiring playbooks, by hand, for one type of client. Standing monitor about 90 minutes a week, plus about 45 minutes per live target through expand, people, waterfall, draft, send, and one follow-up (tradecraft chapter). At five researched sends a week that is about 5.25 hours weekly, ~270 hours a year. Multiply by every kind of client you actually serve. This is why operators run it in panicked bursts instead of year-round.