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Sample deliverable showing the full output of a Complete Hiring Toolkit — everything needed to run a structured hire for one specific role. Delivered as a Google Docs bundle of 7 ready-to-use documents: role definition, job description, interview scorecard, reference check guide, post-interview next steps guide, onboarding checklist, and hiring process overview.
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Founders hiring a designer: The best signal when hiring a designer isn't in their portfolio.
It's in the questions they ask on the first call.
If they don't get your business early, you'll spend the whole project explaining it.
So true! Portfolio shows skills but questions on first call show mindset! If they don't get the business early you'll spend whole project explaining it - 100% fact!
Most inbound bottlenecks aren't caused by low lead volume—they happen during triage.
When inquiries roll into a Google Sheet or CRM, operations teams often waste 10–15 minutes per submission reading through messy paragraphs, deciphering budget mismatch, and manually deciding who gets an immediate call vs. a standard rate sheet.
Instead of adding a bulky CRM add-on, I documented a lightweight 3-step automation pipeline built inside Make:
Intake & Extraction: An active listener triggers immediately upon a new submission, extracting core variables: client scope, target deliverables, timeline, and stated budget.
Context-Aware Evaluation (Gemini 2.5 Flash): The payload passes through an AI evaluation node with strict guardrails:
Evaluates budget against minimum agency criteria.
Assigns a triage score: Hot (immediate priority), Warm (nurture), or Cold (disqualified/template reply).
Generates a strict 15-word operational summary—no long paragraphs.
Determines an automated next step (e.g., routing to an account lead or flagging for asynchronous follow-up).
Data Return & Clean Pipeline: Appends the structured classification directly back to the master operational tracker, keeping the sheet filterable and clean.
The outcome: The sales and operations team can filter the entire board by priority status in two clicks, cutting first-touch response time to minutes without manually reading every single submission.
I’ve documented the full scenario map, execution logic, and data schemas below.
Curious how other agency operators and automation leads here handle their lead enrichment layer—are you doing AI scoring at the form level, or later in the CRM pipeline?:
For the budget gate, I'd keep an unstated budget separate from one explicitly below your minimum. Does the Make route ask for clarification when the amount or currency is missing, so a potentially suitable lead doesn't fall into Cold by default?
Quick experiment with Claude for a lead generation landing page with a waitlist.
Getting to a usable first version was fast. What still takes a designer is hierarchy, spacing and interaction details, which is what decides whether the page conversion.
