Leadership asks you to build a new engineering team and they want the first starters hired by next quarter. You've done this before…it should be no trouble…right? Only this time, you're hiring a distributed team across San Francisco, London and Hyderabad.
The framework I'm sharing will get you ready to launch your international outreach campaign in days, not weeks. It teaches you how to discover local market knowledge and avoid new market hiring mistakes.
I developed this framework because I've managed hiring across 5+ US cities, Hyderabad, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London, at speed. When product deadlines are at stake, bad hires hurt revenue.
How I Build my Prompt
When I am using AI, I've learned I'm always starting from one of two positions:
1. Things that I know — expertise I can draw on to write the first prompt
2. Things that I don't know — I need to be inquisitive and analytical
Knowing which point you are starting from will guide your thinking to create a stronger, more accurate line of prompts.
Here's my framework followed by an example.
BiteSize Prompt Framework
- A clear way of describing your personal profile, role and situation
- A clear explanation of your current level of understanding
- A clear outcome that you want from the GenAI tool
- Key points to help you refine and iterate quickly
So your prompt would be structured like this:
- Profile - this is who I am, what I do and what I know
- Scenario/Situation
- Specific information for context (provide examples or data)
- A clear, direct ask, but open ended question (how, what type questions)
- Iterate and refine
Example
That new engineering team the CTO wants is a 24x7 SRE team distributed across San Francisco, London and Hyderabad. You've never hired in these cities before, especially at the same time.
Let's work through the example of setting up a hiring campaign for 10 SRE Engineers across these three cities.
Prompt
Here's the prompt, ready to copy and paste:
"I'm a TA Director with 5 years of hiring experience, but I'm new to infrastructure roles and have never hired a distributed team across international markets. I need to hire 3 SREs each in San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad in 8 weeks.
Create a comparison table that shows: salary bands by market, key benefits that matter to candidates in each location, typical notice periods, visa sponsorship requirements, and which companies are known for strong SRE teams.
Format as a table so I can see differences side-by-side.
Pro Tips: Follow-Up Prompts
Once you've got your market overview, use these prompts to dig deeper:
Follow-up #1 — Intake Questions:
Create 8-10 intake call questions for hiring managers discussing SRE roles. Focus on: what 'good' looks like for the role, whether they need candidates in specific time zones and what they're willing to compromise on for speed. I'm hiring across San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad.
Follow-up #2 — Interview Strategy:
What should I look for when interviewing SREs across San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad? How does on-call experience differ by location? What's a red flag in one market but not another? Give me specific things to listen for. Upload the intake call notes for reference.
Follow-up #3 — Hiring Velocity:
What are the key metrics I need to track to hire 3 SREs each in San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad in 8 weeks? What's a realistic pipeline size for each market? What's my biggest bottleneck likely to be?
This framework has saved me weeks of research. If you're managing distributed hiring, save this and use it on your next search.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more frameworks and anecdotes about how I built globally distributed teams for DigitalOcean. You'll need them sooner than you think.