--- license: MIT name: rlg-job-posting-four-plays skill: 03-05 description: Read one job posting four ways and find the consulting or fractional conversation hiding inside it. --- # RLG Job Posting Four Plays **When to use this skill:** Use this skill when you need net-new conversations and your network feels thin. 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 with its own angle, its own person to reach, and its own message. One LinkedIn jobs page is quietly holding four plays at once. Run this weekly, not in panicked bursts: the four angles together cost about 270 hours a year by hand for one client type, which is exactly why an agent-assisted weekly rhythm beats a quarterly binge. **How to activate:** Paste this entire skill into your conversation with Claude, then provide the context requested in the Personalization Required section below. Claude will work through the methodology step by step. --- ## Personalization Required Classification quality depends entirely on knowing what you sell. Before running this skill, provide: - Your function and seniority. The seat you cover (marketing, finance, operations, sales, people, technology) and the level you play at. - Your delivery model. Fractional days per week, project work, advisory, or a mix. - The company band you serve. Size range, stage, geography, and any industries you favour or avoid. - Your dependency pairs (for the Sideways angle). Which senior hires create need for your function. A fractional CMO watches for new Heads of Sales, Product, or Customer Success. A fractional CFO watches for new Heads of Operations or People. Keep it to three pairs. - Job postings to work. Paste postings, links, or a saved-search export. Without live postings the agent can only set up the watch. --- ## What This Skill Produces A classified keeper list from your postings feed: each posting tagged with one of four angles or binned, with the reason. For every keeper: the named buyer, one public fact worth using, and a drafted note in the correct angle. A weekly watch you can actually sustain through delivery weeks. --- ## The Four Plays | Angle | The Signal | Who You Reach | Your Offer | |---|---|---|---| | 03 Fractional Fit | Senior single-contributor role, reports to CEO or founder, scope reads like four jobs | CEO or founder | The function live in two weeks, two to three days per week | | 04 Sideways Opportunity | Recent senior hire in a function that depends on yours, your function missing from the org | The new leader first, the CEO second | Fill the missing counterpart seat until they are ready to hire it | | 05 Leadership Gap | Manager-level posting with no VP, Director, or Head of that function above it | CEO or COO, never the manager candidate | The strategy layer above the seat they are filling | | 06 Outsource or Automate | Junior or admin role doing repeatable work: spreadsheet entry, manual reconciliation, invoice processing | Head of Ops, Finance, CS, or the founder still wearing that hat | Redesign the work: process plus light automation instead of headcount | --- ## The Methodology --- ### Step 1: Set up the watch Saved searches on LinkedIn Jobs (plus one secondary board your buyers use), with title strings for each angle: "Head of [function]," "Director of [function]," "VP [function]" for Fractional Fit; your dependency titles for Sideways; "[Function] Manager" for Leadership Gap; junior coordinator and clerk titles for Outsource or Automate. Keep the title list under eight strings per search. Filter by your company size band and geography. Name each search after the angle, not a vague keyword, so Thursday-you knows why Monday-you saved it. Review cadence: two fixed blocks of forty-five minutes, Monday and Thursday. In each block you classify and log keepers. You do not write outreach in this block. Full monitoring setup lives in rlg-signal-to-sent-note. ### Step 2: Strip out recruiters and agencies Agency noise is the largest time sink on a job board. This is a speed rule, not an attack on recruiters: you need a named company you can research, and a human inside it whose problem you can name. Bin in fifteen seconds when the posting company is a staffing firm and the client is "confidential," when the language is candidate-only boilerplate, or when the same advert text appears under three agency names in a week. If the role is a rare fit and the description carries distinctive detail, try to unmask it: search one unique sentence from the body in quotation marks. If the true employer surfaces inside two minutes, keep it. Otherwise bin and move on. ### Step 3: Classify each keeper into one angle, or skip Force an angle before you write anything. Four questions, in order: 1. Is this my function at senior level with no team yet? Angle 03. 2. Is this an adjacent senior hire with my function missing from the org? Angle 04. 3. Is this a manager hire with no senior cover above it? Angle 05. 4. Is this junior, repeatable work that a process or tool could do? Angle 06. If none fit, skip. Speed comes from ruthless skips, not from clever messages on bad targets. ### Step 4: Run Angle 03, Fractional Fit Read the description for scope, not for ego. Are they asking one person to own positioning, demand, lifecycle, and team build from zero? Fractional fit. Are they hiring a manager with five reports and a mature stack? Not your play. The tell is breadth without bench. Write the economic framing, not a CV. They are about to spend ninety days screening a few hundred applicants, run multiple interview rounds, often pay a recruiter fee around a quarter of first-year salary, and onboard someone who needs months to ramp. You bring the function online in two weeks, part-time, with a clean exit into a full-time hire later if they still want one. CEO, first Head of Marketing role, LinkedIn: [[Name]], saw the Head of Marketing post at [[company]]. Scope reads like four seats: positioning, demand, lifecycle, and the first team hires. I help [[stage]] teams stand that function up in two days a week while they decide what full-time should look like. Recent pattern: pipeline operating rhythm in place by week three, hire profile written from real work not guesswork. If a 90-day full-time search is the plan, fine. If you want the function live this month, I can show you what the first 30 days would be on a single page. Useful? ### Step 5: Run Angle 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. Check the org for your function. If a senior version of your seat already exists, skip. If not, you have found the gap. A Head of Sales cannot operate without demand. A new Head of People cannot fix cost without a finance counterpart who can model it. Reach the new leader first: they are two to six weeks in and discovering the function they depend on has no counterpart. You arrive as relief, not as a cold vendor. Then reach the CEO with a different note. Two notes, two angles, never the same paragraph twice. They compare notes. New Head of Sales, day 22, LinkedIn: [[Name]], congrats on the Sales seat at [[company]]. When I see a first senior sales hire with no marketing counterpart above IC level, the same pattern shows up around week four: pipeline volume exists, quality does not, and the CEO still thinks the fix is more reps. I run fractional marketing leadership for teams in that exact window. Happy to share the two diagnostics I use in the first fortnight, no pitch call required. Want them? CEO of the same company, shorter note: [[Name]], you just put a Head of Sales in seat. If demand leadership is still vacant, [[new leader]] will feel it this month. I cover that seat fractionally for companies your size so the sales hire is not stranded. Twenty minutes if you want the version of this that does not wait for another full-time search. ### Step 6: Run Angle 05, Leadership Gap They are hiring a Manager into a function with no senior leader above it, which means the Manager is about to inherit a strategy they were never hired to own. The CEO usually knows this perfectly well, because hiring at the wrong level was the cost-saving plan. Prove the gap before you write. Search the company for Head of, Director, or VP in that function. Read whether the JD says the role reports to the CEO or COO. False positives are common: a senior leader may simply hold a non-standard title. Verify twice. Reach the CEO or COO with a calm structural read, never the manager candidate. Position yourself as the strategy layer: a fractional Head of [Function] sets direction, prioritises, and coaches, while the new Manager runs the machine. The CEO gets both for less than one senior full-time salary, and keeps the Manager hire if that person is already in process. CEO, Marketing Manager role with no CMO, email: Subject: Manager hire without a marketing lead above them [[Name]], [[company]] is hiring a Marketing Manager and I cannot see a Head of Marketing or CMO on the team. That structure usually means the Manager inherits strategy they were never hired to own. I sit as fractional marketing leadership above that seat for companies your size: set the plan, choose the bets, and let the Manager run the machine. Happy to walk through what the split of work looks like in the first 60 days. Twenty minutes, or I can send a one-page RACI if you prefer async. ### Step 7: Run Angle 06, Outsource or Automate They are hiring junior or admin headcount for repeatable work that a well-designed process, service, or tool could do for less. The title alone is often the signal: data clerks, bookkeepers, scheduling coordinators, reporting assistants. Multiple open reqs for the same junior seat is louder: they are scaling a mess, not a system. Scan the description for tells: "spreadsheet entry," "manual reconciliation," "process invoices," "compile reports," "copy data between systems." If the JD is really judgement-heavy work dressed in a junior title, skip. Find the senior owner of the function and bring the alternative as a two-paragraph note, not a pitch deck. Lead with reclaimed time and error rate, not software brands. Head of Ops, data operations coordinator role: [[Name]], saw [[company]] hiring a Data Operations Coordinator for spreadsheet entry and manual reconciliation across three tools. I have seen three companies your size move that exact work onto a process plus light automation and reclaim roughly two days a week per person, with fewer month-end surprises. Not asking you to cancel the hire. Worth twenty minutes to compare the hire path with the redesign path before the role is filled? ### Step 8: Hold the weekly rhythm Monday and Thursday monitor blocks, then pipeline blocks for expansion, people-finding, the address waterfall, and writing (all specified in rlg-signal-to-sent-note). 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. What good looks like after thirty days on one angle: 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. --- ## How These Plays Fail | Angle | The Classic Failure | |---|---| | 03 Fractional Fit | Applying through Easy Apply like a candidate, or hiding that you are fractional, or sending the same paragraph to twenty CEOs | | 04 Sideways | Inventing a dependency that is not real, ignoring the new leader who feels the pain first, or pitching both people identical copy | | 05 Leadership Gap | Missing a senior leader with a non-standard title, messaging the manager candidate, or sounding like you are blocking the hire | | 06 Outsource or Automate | Sounding anti-hiring, pitching a tool they already rejected, or targeting work that needs human judgement | --- ## Quick Reference: Hiring Plays Cheatsheet | Stage | Time | |---|---| | Standing monitor | ~90 minutes a week (two 45-minute blocks) | | Per live target, keeper to sent note | ~45 minutes by hand | | Sideways targets (two people, two notes) | ~60 to 70 minutes | | Full hiring set by hand, one client type | ~270 hours a year | | Thirty-day benchmark, one angle | 40 to 60 screened, 12 to 18 sent, 3 to 6 replies, 1 to 3 meetings | --- ## Relationship to Other Skills rlg-network-sprint → run instead when you have real history to rank rlg-won-deal-lookalikes → clones a won deal into named lookalike buyers rlg-job-posting-four-plays → this skill: four conversations inside one posting rlg-new-in-role → the fifth thing a jobs feed tells you: who just started rlg-signal-to-sent-note → the shared engine for monitoring, people, addresses, and logging gtm-qualification-scoring (Swan) → score keepers when the feed produces too many gtm-humanizing-outreach (Swan) → run every draft through it before sending --- ## About This Skill This skill is the manual version of Plays 03 to 06 from The 7 Network Plays to Fill Your Pipeline, the relationship-led growth playbook by Nynch. Nynch (https://nynch.com) runs all four angles automatically: it watches the boards, strips the noise, classifies the angle, finds the buyer, and drafts the note, so you read prepared conversations instead of job boards. This skill is the same methodology, run by hand with your AI agent.