Automate Before You Hire: A Practical Checklist

Hiring is one of the most powerful levers in business, and one of the most expensive. Before you add headcount to absorb repetitive work, it is worth asking whether the work should exist in its current form at all.

The checklist

• Is the task triggered by an event? A form, an email, a payment — events are automation's natural starting point.
• Does it follow rules most of the time? If 80% of cases follow a pattern, automate the 80% and route the rest to a human.
• Is the output text, data or a document? Modern LLMs handle drafting, classifying and summarising remarkably well.
• Can you measure success? If you cannot tell whether it worked, neither can a machine.

Then hire for judgement

Once the repetitive layer runs itself, the people you hire can focus on relationships, creativity and judgement — the work that grows a business.