Harbourline Freight needed 140 terminal operators across four Nordic sites before peak season. Every seat was filled with nine days to spare, and every hire traces back to a written brief.

Harbourline connects Nordic shippers with more than 70 carriers and runs its own cross-dock terminals in Gothenburg, Aarhus, Oslo and Turku. Seasonal hiring used to run on spreadsheets and phone screens. Each site lead had their own idea of a good operator, so an applicant in Turku was asked different questions from an applicant in Aarhus.

One brief per role, written by the people who run the floor

Before a single job ad went live, each site lead wrote a brief in Yardstick: the shifts, the certifications that matter and five questions every applicant would answer. A brief took about an hour to write, and HR reviewed it the same day.

• Forklift certification and shift availability as hard requirements

• Five structured questions, answered in the applicant’s own language

• A written rubric for each question, visible to every reviewer

Shortlists reviewed the same afternoon

At peak, applications arrived at up to 900 a week. Yardstick read every one against the brief and showed its reasoning next to each score, so a site lead could check a shortlist in an afternoon instead of a week.

Median time from application to first interview fell from 11 days to 2.

The season in numbers

Figures compare the 2025 winter season with peak season 2026, across all four terminals.

A record of who decided what

Every shortlist decision is logged with the reviewer, the rubric and the note they left. When a rejected applicant asked why, Harbourline could answer in writing within a day. See how the decision log works.

What comes next

1. Reuse the same briefs for the 2027 winter season

2. Add Finnish and Swedish answers side by side for the Turku brief

3. Share one rubric library across all four terminals