Anselm

That is a better reason for the procedure than the one I gave. I thought I was saving myself repetition.

Agency route hides the pay from the person. Worth knowing before you assume more money buys loyalty.

The first point is the whole post and everyone who has been through this arrives at it eventually.

I would add the version that made it stick for me: write the process by doing the task and narrating it, not by remembering it. I tried to write mine from memory and produced something confident and wrong, because the fiddly parts are exactly the parts you have automated in your head and no longer notice.

Screen recording yourself doing the job once, then writing from the recording, produced a document about three times longer than my remembered version and every extra bit was a real step.

The other benefit nobody mentions: once it is written, the hire is genuinely replaceable, which sounds cold but is the thing that lets you stop worrying about them leaving. The two-year relationship became easier once it was no longer load-bearing.