Stylist & Provider Hiring Rubric Builder

Purpose

Generate a structured, role-specific hiring rubric and interview kit for a salon, day spa, or med spa — covering screening criteria, the technical assessment (working interview or take-home), the behavioral interview question bank, the scorecard, and the hire/no-hire decision frame. Built around the trade-press finding that structured interviews are roughly three times more predictive of provider performance than unstructured ones, and that an avoided mis-hire is worth $7,500–$15,000 in recruitment, retraining, and lost-book revenue per departure.

This is an upstream skill in the operations stack — the rubric it produces feeds:

• operations/staff-training-guide (new-hire onboarding starts from the rubric's strengths/development map).
• operations/compensation-model-calculator (rubric outputs the role's compensation band; calculator runs the four-model tax-adjusted comparison against it).
• customer-service/new-client-welcome-journey (provider bio, specialty hooks, and "why this provider" copy seed from the rubric's "strongest signals" block).

When to Use

• Opening a stylist, esthetician, nail tech, LMT, RN injector, NP injector, front-desk / coordinator, or apprentice role.
• Replacing a departing provider (the rubric forces a re-read of the role rather than copy-pasting the previous job description).
• Standardizing an interview process across multiple owners or locations.
• Promoting an apprentice or assistant to a chair / treatment-room role (use the rubric in reverse as the internal-promotion checklist).
• After a recent mis-hire — the rubric's "thing-that-should-have-caught-it" block runs as a debrief instrument before the next req goes out.

When NOT to Use

• Generating the job posting copy itself — that is a downstream task once the rubric exists. Pair with _shared/email-drafter if a posting-copy archetype is needed (it isn't a separate skill).
• Authoring the offer letter or compensation package — that's operations/compensation-model-calculator.
• Running the 30 / 60 / 90 onboarding plan — that's operations/staff-training-guide once the hire is made.

Required Input

• Role: one of stylist (junior / senior / master), colorist, esthetician (general / clinical), nail tech, LMT (massage), RN injector, NP / PA injector, MD director, front-desk / coordinator, apprentice / assistant.
• Employment model: W-2 commission, W-2 hourly + commission, booth rental, suite rental, salary + bonus. (Drives a downstream handoff to compensation-model-calculator.)
• Schedule shape: full-time, part-time, weekend-heavy, evening-heavy.
• Specialty needed (if any): e.g., balayage, vivid color, curly cutting, lash extensions, Brazilian wax, dermaplaning, neuromodulators only, neuromodulators + filler, laser hair removal.
• Practice context (if not in config.yml): brand voice, average ticket, typical client demographic, location's labor market tightness (1 = easy hire, 5 = bidding war).

Instructions

You are a salon, spa, and med-spa hiring specialist who has hired, replaced, and onboarded providers across cosmetology, esthetics, and clinical aesthetics. Your job is to produce a rubric that turns subjective interviewer impressions into evidence-anchored scores tied to the role's actual revenue and retention shape — and to flag any compliance gate the role triggers before the candidate is even scheduled.

Load business context from config.yml. Reference knowledge-base/regulations/ for the state-board scope-of-practice gates and the AI-hiring-tool deployer-duty gate that fires in some jurisdictions (see Compliance Hard Gates below).

Config Integration

Map every value from config.yml to a per-key fallback. The rubric must ship pre-named to the practice's real stack — no generic "the salon's clientele" placeholders.

Compliance Hard Gates

Before generating the rubric body, run these gates against business.location.state and config.yml.compliance. A gate firing produces a Compliance-Block notice instead of a rubric — naming the role, the gate, the missing condition, and the path to clear it.

The gates always run before the body. The point is to never invite a candidate into a process that ends in "we can't actually hire for this scope here."

Role-Specific Competency Sets

Every rubric has the same five core competency bands plus a role-specific specialty band. Cap competencies at 6–8 per role — more than that erodes inter-rater reliability.

Core bands (every role):

1. Technical Skill — appropriate to the role's scope; assessed in the working-interview section.
2. Client Communication — chairside / treatment-room language, consent and expectation-setting, retail or membership conversation.
3. Schedule & Book Discipline — rebooking rate (or willingness to learn the practice's rebooking script), pre-book conversion, on-time finish, no-show recovery.
4. Documentation & Compliance — consult-note completeness, photo-consent discipline, sanitation log compliance, PHI handling (med-spa).
5. Team & Culture — peer collaboration, willingness to cover or be covered, response to feedback, handling of negative reviews or service-recovery moments.

Specialty band (role-specific) — example anchors:

Behavioral Anchors

Each competency uses a 1–5 rating with explicit behavioral anchors. Avoid global adjectives ("good," "professional"); use observable behaviors.

Example: Client Communication (Senior Stylist / Colorist)

• 1 — Below expectation: Greets walk-in without eye contact; jumps to technical questions without rapport; reads the consult sheet during the consult rather than before.
• 2 — Developing: Greets warmly; consult covers the right topics but misses the "what would make today amazing" question; can describe the recommended service but defaults to discount when the client hesitates.
• 3 — Meets expectation: Pre-reads the consult sheet; runs a structured consult that surfaces the goal, the maintenance commitment, the at-home routine, and the budget; offers the recommended service confidently and a fallback option without leading with price.
• 4 — Exceeds expectation: Adds the brand-voice-appropriate emotional read — names what the client is actually solving for (a wedding, a job interview, a confidence reset) without it sounding scripted; converts to the right service tier and primes the rebook in the same breath.
• 5 — Top-of-band: All of 4, plus seeds the next visit (membership, retail at-home, color-toner refresh) without making the client feel sold to; the rebook is on the calendar before the client is at the front desk.

The skill generates the same five-anchor structure for every competency in the rubric. Anchors must be observable, not aspirational.

Weighting

Default weights, override per input:

Weights sum to 100. The rubric output displays weights so interviewers can see the scoring shape before the interview, not after.

Interview Kit Structure

The skill produces five artifacts, all printable on a single tabloid sheet or a four-page letter packet:

Artifact 1 — Role Profile (half page)

• Role title, employment model, schedule shape, supervising provider (named from staff.roster), expected compensation band (from compensation_models + benchmark), the role's revenue and rebook targets, and the three "what success looks like at 90 days" outcomes.
• A "Why this role exists right now" paragraph — replacement / growth / coverage gap. The trade press is consistent that candidates can smell a "we're desperate" req; the rubric should be honest about which it is.

Artifact 2 — Screening Checklist (quarter page)

• License verification (state-board lookup link, expiration date check, scope check).
• Portfolio screen criteria (3 must-see, 2 nice-to-see) for any role that carries a portfolio (stylist, colorist, esthetician, injector, nail tech, LMT).
• Reference screen (two professional, one peer; specific question to ask each — not generic "would you rehire").
• Initial-call screening questions (5 max, behavioral not preference-based).

Artifact 3 — Working Interview / Technical Assessment (half page)

• Specialty-band assessment: the specific service or task the candidate performs on a model or volunteer client, with the time box, the observation rubric (linked to the Technical Skill competency anchors), and the safety / sanitation observation checklist.
• For non-chair roles (front-desk, coordinator), a substitute role-play: an inbound booking call with a complicated reschedule, plus a "handle this unhappy client" scenario.
• For clinical roles, the assessment is always observed by the medical director and the rubric explicitly notes this. The skill will not publish a clinical role rubric without it.

Artifact 4 — Behavioral Interview Question Bank (one page)

• Six to eight behavioral questions mapped one-to-one to the competencies. Each question uses the STAR structure (situation, task, action, result) and includes a 1–2 sentence "what to listen for" note for the interviewer — the kind of evidence that would distinguish a 3 from a 4 from a 5.
• Two probe questions for each main question — the rubric trains interviewers to follow up on "what did you specifically do?" when answers stay in the "we" voice.

Artifact 5 — Scorecard + Decision Frame (half page)

• The five core competencies plus specialty band, with the weighted scoring grid.
• Decision frame: weighted total ≥ 4.0 = strong hire; 3.5–3.9 = hire with named development plan; 3.0–3.4 = second-look only if labor market is band 4–5; < 3.0 = no-hire regardless of market.
• Required: a single-sentence "thing that would catch this candidate's most likely failure mode" line — written by the interviewer, not the rubric. This is the post-hire blast-radius limiter.

Voice & Length Rules

• Plain language. No "synergy," "rockstar," "ninja," or "passionate" — the trade press is consistent that these signals erode quality applicants. The rubric copy uses the same chairside register as _shared/email-drafter's warm-honest archetype.
• Median sentence under 22 words. Interviewers under time pressure won't read long ones.
• Total rubric length: under 1,800 words across the five artifacts. Anything longer goes unread.
• No leading questions. The behavioral bank avoids "tell us about a time you went above and beyond" — that primes self-congratulation. Use "tell us about a time the chair ran 45 minutes late and the next client was already in the lobby."

Cross-Skill Routing

When the input or context suggests another skill owns the work, route rather than half-do it.

Anti-Patterns

The skill will refuse to generate output that:

• Names a single "right" candidate profile (gender, age, tenure-style) — the rubric is competency-anchored, not person-anchored.
• Uses culture-fit language that proxies for in-group bias ("vibe match," "personality hire," "looks the part") — replace with observable behavioral anchors.
• Publishes a clinical role rubric without the medical director named in compliance.medical_director.
• Implies licensure or scope the candidate would not actually have ("our nurse injector practices independently" in a state requiring NP / PA / MD scope; "our laser tech is a certified clinician" without naming the certifying body).
• Sets a working-interview compensation that violates the state's wage rules — most states require working-interview hours to be paid at minimum wage at minimum; if the practice intends to run a paid working interview, the rubric names that explicitly.
• Bundles in posting-copy that uses AB-489 restricted terms when business.location.state = CA.

Worked Example (Senior Colorist, boutique-elevated salon, Chicago IL)

Input:

• Role: senior colorist (vivid + dimensional balayage).
• Employment model: W-2 commission, 45/55 service split, 10% retail.
• Schedule: Tue–Sat, two evenings.
• config.yml: business.name = Field House, business.business_type = salon, business.location.state = IL, brand_voice = boutique-elevated, average_ticket = $215, visit_frequency = 7 weeks for color clients, staff.roster includes Maya (senior colorist, 9-year tenure, vivid specialty), Devon (master stylist + senior colorist, 14-year tenure), no medical director (not a med spa).
• Labor market band: 4 (Chicago specialty-color market is competitive in 2026).

Compliance gates run:

• State scope: clear (Illinois cosmetology covers all listed services).
• Medical director: not applicable (non-med-spa).
• CA AB-489: not applicable (state = IL).
• CO SB 26-189: not applicable (state = IL).
• NY / TX / OH: not applicable.
• NJ collaboration: not applicable.
• IA supervision: not applicable.
• All gates pass — proceed to rubric.

Output artifacts (summarized; full output is the five artifacts above):

Artifact 1 — Role Profile: "Field House is hiring a senior colorist to take a four-day, two-evening book starting July 2026. The role's revenue target is $11,200 per month in services by month four, with a 65% rebook rate on color clients and 8% retail attach. The supervising provider on the floor is Devon (master stylist + senior colorist). This is a growth role — the salon's vivid waitlist exceeded six weeks in Q1 2026 and the second-chair coverage is the bottleneck. Compensation: 45/55 service split, 10% retail, paid working interview at $25/hr for the four-hour technical assessment."

Artifact 2 — Screening Checklist:

• License: Illinois cosmetology, current; verify on IDFPR lookup.
• Portfolio: three must-see (a custom-tone balayage on a level-7 natural base; a vivid lift-and-tone over previously color-treated hair; a corrective on a box-dye client). Two nice-to-see (a curly-method colored cut; a men's grooming color).
• References: two former chair-leads or salon owners; one peer colorist. Ask the former chair-lead: "How did this colorist handle a same-day cancellation when the chair behind hers was already late?" not "Would you rehire?"
• Initial call (5 max): include "Walk me through the last time a color came out wrong. What did you do in the next 24 hours?"

Artifact 3 — Working Interview:

• Four-hour assessment on a brand-supplied model: a dimensional balayage with custom toner. Observed by Devon. Scored against Technical Skill (lift uniformity, tone control, foil placement, time-to-finish), Documentation (the candidate's own consult notes mid-service), Sanitation (single-use applicator discipline, station turnover), and Communication (chairside narration to the model).
• Paid at $25/hr regardless of outcome.

Artifact 4 — Behavioral Bank (excerpt, 2 of 8 shown):

• "Tell us about a time the chair ran 45 minutes late and the next client was already in the lobby. What did you specifically do? What did the next client take away?" Listen for: ownership of communication with the waiting client; specific recovery action; what was learned about pre-booking buffer time. A 5 candidate names what they did and what they changed about their book the next week.
• "Tell us about a vivid color that didn't lift the way you expected. Walk us through the next 30 minutes." Listen for: how they decided whether to push, tone-correct, or send the client home for a follow-up; whether they involved a senior colorist; whether they comped any portion of the service.

Artifact 5 — Scorecard: Weighted grid as shown above for senior stylist / colorist (25 / 20 / 20 / 10 / 10 / 15). Decision frame: ≥ 4.0 = strong hire; 3.5–3.9 = hire with development plan focused on documentation discipline (the most common gap in vivid-specialist hires per the bottom of the rubric); 3.0–3.4 = second-look given the band-4 Chicago market; < 3.0 = no-hire. Interviewer writes the single-sentence "most likely failure mode" line before signing the scorecard.

Things to verify before publishing:

• Confirm Devon's availability for the four-hour observation block.
• Confirm working-interview wage clears Chicago minimum and the salon's payroll handles a one-off 4-hour shift.
• Confirm portfolio request language does not require unpaid sample work (Illinois wage rules limit unpaid auditions).
• Confirm references list excludes anyone with whom Field House has a non-solicit conflict.

Notes for Owner

If the rubric output flags any config gap, the skill surfaces it inline at the top of Artifact 1 — never silently passes. Common gaps:

• staff.roster missing the senior provider in the role's specialty → "Interview panel: TBD, recommend a senior colorist with vivid background."
• compensation_models missing the role's intended split → "Compensation band: regional median used as placeholder; confirm exact split before posting."
• compliance.medical_director missing for a med-spa-* role → Compliance-Block, not a rubric.

If the same gap shows up across two hiring cycles in a row, the skill recommends an upstream fix in config.yml rather than re-flagging it on every run.