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OpsTower Docs

Hiring an Employee

Hiring an employee is a guided, multi-step process. You pick a type, give the employee an identity and a goal, optionally tailor it, and then OpsTower onboards it with real research before it starts work. This page walks through the whole flow.

Requirements

Section titled “Requirements”

Before you can hire, two conditions must be met (both are enforced on the server):

  • Plan. Employees are a Growth plan and above capability. On lower tiers, the Employees page shows an upgrade prompt instead of a hire button. (Any employees you hired before a downgrade keep working and stay visible.)
  • Credits. Hiring kicks off onboarding research, which spends credits. If your account is out of credits, hiring is paused until you top up. Your existing employees are unaffected.

You’ll also be asked to fill in your account basics (company name, website, and a short product description) if you haven’t already – the employee uses this context during onboarding.

Starting a hire

Section titled “Starting a hire”
  1. Open the Employees page from the sidebar.
  2. Click Hire employee (top-right, or in the empty state if you have none yet).
  3. The hire wizard opens. It has six steps, shown across the top.

The wizard does not save a draft. If you close it, your progress is discarded – so finish in one sitting.

Step 1 — Choose a type

Section titled “Step 1 — Choose a type”

Pick the kind of employee you want to hire. Each type is shown as a card with a short description:

  • Market Analyst – researches your market, competitors, and positioning.
  • Content Strategist – plans, drafts, and learns from your organic content.

See Employees Overview for what each type does. Your choice here determines the role-specific options later in the wizard, and it cannot be changed after hiring.

Step 2 — Basics

Section titled “Step 2 — Basics”

Give the employee its identity:

  • Name (required) – the personal name you’ll use to address them, like “Maya.” This is distinct from their job title. The field is pre-filled with a suggestion you can shuffle or replace.
  • Job title (required) – e.g. “Market Analyst.”
  • Department (optional) – a label used to group employees in lists, e.g. “Marketing.”

Step 3 — Role

Section titled “Step 3 — Role”

This step defines who the employee reports to and what success looks like:

  • Manager name and email (required) – pre-filled from your own profile, since the most common case is hiring your own employee. Edit these if you’re hiring on someone else’s behalf. The manager is surfaced in the employee’s instructions so it knows who to report to, and the manager is who the employee emails by default.
  • KPI (required) – one sentence describing what this employee should optimize for, e.g. “Keep me 5 minutes ahead of the market.” This appears in the employee’s instructions on every turn, so keep it sharp.
  • Custom instructions (optional, up to 10,000 characters) – any quirks, preferences, or guardrails, e.g. “Always cite sources. Skip speculation about competitor financials unless data is public.”
  • Type-specific options – depending on the type you chose:
    • Market Analyst – a list of known competitors (optional; the employee discovers competitors on its own if you leave it blank).
    • Content Strategist – your channel URLs (blog, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, YouTube – all optional).

Step 4 — Onboarding

Section titled “Step 4 — Onboarding”

Optionally provide one-time onboarding instructions (up to 10,000 characters) – guidance that applies only to the employee’s very first planning session, not forever. This is for context like “We just pivoted to B2B; start by reviewing the new pitch deck.”

Unlike custom instructions, onboarding instructions are read once during the employee’s initial planning and never appear in its day-to-day instructions afterward. Leave this blank if you have nothing special to add.

Step 5 — Knowledge

Section titled “Step 5 — Knowledge”

Optionally attach files from your organization’s knowledge library so the employee has them as context from day one. You can also connect knowledge later.

Step 6 — Review

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A summary of every choice you made, with an Edit link on each row that jumps you back to the relevant step. When everything looks right, click Hire employee.

What happens after you hire

Section titled “What happens after you hire”

Hiring doesn’t drop a blank assistant into your workspace – the employee onboards itself first:

  1. Onboarding starts. OpsTower kicks off an onboarding workflow that does real research about your company and market (for a Market Analyst, this means studying your competitors and positioning; for a Content Strategist, auditing your existing content, channels, and voice).
  2. You’re taken to the employee’s chat, where an onboarding progress panel shows the status moving through researching and ingesting.
  3. You’re notified when it’s ready. Onboarding can take a little while; you’ll get a notification when status reaches complete. Occasionally an employee finishes near-instantly if no external research is required.
  4. The employee runs its first planning session, using everything it learned (plus any onboarding instructions you gave) to decide what work to schedule – and from then on it runs autonomously.

If onboarding fails to start or errors out, the employee is still created and you’ll see a warning with a retry option on its chat page.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”