Your gut isn't a hiring strategy.A hiring system your whole team can actually use.
Decide what matters before the first resume arrives. The Plugboard evaluates every applicant against it, turns gaps into interview questions, and brings your team's scorecards together when it's time to decide. You make the call, with the evidence in one place.
Built by an HR professional who's been in the room when hiring goes wrong.
The problem
Most hiring tools are filing cabinets with a login page.
They collect resumes, move candidates through stages, and give your team somewhere to record what happened. What they don't do is connect those stages, so every decision starts from scratch.
On most small teams, gut feel fills the gaps. Five managers, five ideas of “good.” Interviews that wander. Debriefs rebuilt from memory. And six months later, nobody can say why you hired who you hired. Meanwhile, the candidate on the other end is still waiting to hear whether anyone read their application.
What we built instead
A hiring system, not a filing cabinet.
- Criteria you set before the first resume arrives, so every candidate is measured the same way
- Must-have tracking so dealbreakers surface before the interview, not after
- Interview questions built from what you still need to learn about each candidate
- Each interviewer's own scorecard, brought together for the debrief
- A Plug Score that summarizes the evidence, so your team decides with everything in one place
The full hiring journey
Most tools track the process.
The Plugboard connects it.
What you decide matters at the start becomes what every candidate is evaluated against, what every interview investigates, and what your team has in front of them when it's time to decide.
Two sides, one platform
For employers, structure without the bureaucracy.
For candidates, a process that actually sees them.
For employers
- Scoring on the criteria you set, not gut-feel ranking
- Must-have tracking surfaces dealbreakers before you interview
- Structured interview guides generated from each candidate's gaps
- A hiring record that stays with the role after it closes
For candidates
- Store your resume once, auto-populate every application
- Track every job you applied for and where it stands
- See where you stand: applied, under review, interviewing, decision, and a clear answer when a role closes
- Make your profile visible to employers when you're ready to be found
From one early hiring partner
The numbers behind the process.
1 week
Time to hire
For a role that previously took 1+ months to fill
72 → 1
Applicants to confident hire
Four screens. One interview. No second-guessing.
Built for
If you see yourself here, we built this for you.
Click a card to see how The Plugboard helps.
The HR Team of One
You're juggling recruiting, onboarding, compliance, and retention across a dozen open roles. Hiring can't be another thing that breaks.
Focus Where It Matters
The Plug takes the first pass on every applicant, so your limited hours go where your expertise makes the biggest difference.
The Niche Employer
The skills that matter in your work don't always show up on a resume.
Find the Hidden Matches
Structured evaluation criteria surface candidates who have the right capabilities, even when their experience doesn't fit a standard template.
The Growing Team
Your hiring managers are strong performers who got promoted into leadership, many with no formal interview training.
Build Hiring Skills on the Job
Every candidate comes with an interview guide built from their gaps, so first-time managers learn what good interviewing looks like by doing it.
The Multi-Location Operator
Hiring managers across different sites, different standards, different ideas of what 'good' looks like. Consistency feels impossible.
One Standard, Every Location
One set of criteria and one scorecard format give every location the same framework without losing local context.
The Buried Recruiter
You spend hours writing candidate summaries, formatting interview notes, and pulling together feedback from across the team.
Summaries That Write Themselves
Professional candidate summaries are auto-generated from evaluations your team already completed. No extra work, just better documentation.
The Values-Driven Employer
You know what makes someone great on your team. But it lives in your head, and every manager describes it differently.
Make It Observable
Turn what matters on your team into behaviors you can actually observe. Then give every candidate the same opportunity to demonstrate them.
Hiring with purpose
Better hiring for your team.
Real opportunity for someone else.
The Plugboard was built to fund The Plug NW, a Portland nonprofit building pathways for justice-impacted people and others overlooked by traditional systems. The same belief runs through both: when employers name and evaluate what actually matters, people who don't look perfect on paper get a real chance to show what they can do.