Custom skills

A skill is a set of written instructions your agent follows: how your team sources, the tone of your outreach, the checks you run before a shortlist goes out. Hyreflow ships its own skills. On the dashboard's Skills page you can add your own.

Custom skills are in beta.

How your agent uses them

An agent connected to Hyreflow over MCP checks your skills at the start of a task, reads the ones whose description fits, and follows them. It sees what you see on the Skills page. You can also ask it to save a way of working as a skill. See Your own skills for the tools.

Personal and team skills

• A personal skill is yours alone. Nobody else in the workspace sees it, including the owner. It's live as soon as you save it. If you leave the workspace, your personal skills there are deleted.
• A team skill is shared with everyone in the workspace. When a member creates or edits one, it waits for the workspace owner to approve it, and the owner gets an email. A team skill the owner writes is live straight away.

While a new version of a team skill waits for approval, everyone keeps getting the last approved version, so nobody's agent runs instructions the owner hasn't seen. Only its author and the owner can read a version that waits, and other members can't save a new one until the owner has decided. If the author saves again first, the newer version replaces the older one in the queue. The owner can approve or reject a version and leave a note for the author.

Writing a skill

You write and change skills through your agent, not on the dashboard. Ask it: "save how we write outreach emails as a team skill". It asks you a few questions, shows you a draft, and saves it, following Hyreflow's built-in hyreflow-custom-skills guide. To change a skill, open it on the Skills page, click Copy name, and tell your agent what to change in it. The Skills page is where you read skills, compare versions, approve or reject them, and delete them.

Your agent needs the Hyreflow MCP connection to save a skill (see MCP setup), or it can use the API. A skill is a SKILL.md. The two lines at the top tell the agent what the skill is and when to use it:

---
name: acme-outreach-tone
description: House tone for every candidate email Acme sends
---

- Keep emails under 120 words.
- Lead with the role, not the company.

• name is 1 to 64 lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens, and can't start with hyreflow. A skill keeps its name for life. To rename one, create a new skill.
• description is one line of at most 1,024 characters.
• The two lines at the top are plain key: value lines. Nested or multi-line entries are refused.
• Skills are text only: .md, .txt, .json, .yaml, .yml and .csv files, up to 50 files and 512 KB in total. Scripts and other executable files are refused. Longer material goes in its own file, such as references/templates.md, and SKILL.md says when to read it.
• A workspace holds up to 200 skills.
• Lines that pipe into a shell (| bash) or use sudo are refused, because agent harnesses that scan skills before loading them reject skills that contain them.

Versions

Every save is a new version, and the last 100 versions of a skill stay readable (the live version and one waiting for approval are always kept). Open a skill to see its history: who saved each version, when, and whether it was approved, rejected or replaced. Saving the same content twice doesn't create a version.

Who can do what

The same rules apply to the API: see Custom skills in the API reference.