Built for businesses making their first real hires.
Thistledown Consulting was founded to close the gap most small businesses fall into — big enough to need real hiring discipline, too small to have an HR department. We work with owners who are hiring on instinct because nobody ever showed them another way.
Every engagement starts by looking at your last few hires, good and bad, before we change anything. Process fixes that ignore what went wrong last time aren’t fixes — they’re guesses in a nicer folder.
Four steps to a hiring process you can trust.
Hiring audit
A review of your last several hires and your current process, to find exactly where candidates are getting misjudged.
Process build
Job scoping, interview scripts, scorecards, and reference-check steps built around the role you’re actually filling.
Manager training
We train whoever’s doing the interviewing, so the process holds up when we’re not in the room.
90-day follow-up
We stay available for the first few hires under the new process, then check it is actually catching the right candidates.
We don’t run payroll, and we don’t recruit for you.
Payroll and benefits administration are outside our scope. And a recruiter finds you candidates; we build the process that decides which ones are actually right, so you stop relying on any one recruiter’s judgment call.
Let’s fix the process before your next hire.
A short audit tells you exactly where your current hiring process is leaking good candidates or letting the wrong ones through.