How to conduct a perfect intake meeting to figure out what the hiring manager really wants?

When was the last time you had an intake meeting where you and the hiring manager got out smiling? Intake meetings have become a chore for recruiters and sourcers – because we’ve doing it wrong.

One of the biggest problem with intake meetings is that both parties are unsure at the end of it. The hiring managers don’t always know whom they want to hire. There is always a discrepancy about what is it exactly do they want and how far can they compromise on the perfect candidate. It is also about expectations management. Quite often hiring managers want a unicorn but all data points to the fact that a stallion would do the job and unicorn will never be found.

After interviewing a few best of the breed recruiters and from my own experience, we came up with a list of things one should do in the intake meeting.

Understanding the role

Understanding the role is the primary purpose of an intake meeting. Here’s how you should approach it.

How to effectively profile the desired candidate?

In the intake meeting, it is your job to ask questions that helps hiring manager to spell out the desired candidate profile more efficiently. The mistake most of us make is to start with the questions like

How many years of experience should the candidate have?
What should be education/experience pedigree?
What is the compensation structure?
What are the essential and good to have skills in the candidate?
A general idea about the team and the culture

This is a wrong starting point. Ofcourse all of this information is important. This framework leaves the room for ambiguity and doesn’t help you understand the role. Most importantly it doesn’t help you gauge hiring manager’s expectations. Here’s how the best recruiters take the intake meeting.

Probe about the work not the keywords

Pros don’t jump to keywords. They rather ask the hiring managers the real work profile. What will the hired candidate do everyday. What would be performance metrics and what is expected out of them. Instead they ask: What would the hired candidate achieve in 30 days, 90 days and 360 days? This gives you a much better idea of who the ideal candidate is for the job, not the hiring manager’s idea of ideal candidate for the job. The answer to this question will tell you what would it take for the candidate to do the job.

Ask about the people they will work with and not cultural values

Culture is hard to define. Most people define culture as a set of words, or a bunch of vague statements like “We like to have fun at work” etc etc you know the drill. There is a much simpler way to understand a company’s culture. Ask people there about their day! As simple as that!

Who would be the teammates candidate would be working with and what makes them unique in the team?

Following this, you should discuss expected experience, salary range and cultural aspects of the team. Here’s a simple questionairre that you should fill out with the hiring manager. It is designed to help you understand the role at a deeper, more insightful level.

What should the ideal candidate will achieve in 30 days, 90 days and 360 days?
What will be the careers development path for the ideal candidate in the organisation in next 3-5 years?
What is the compensation structure?
What are the likely organisations where the ideal candidate currently works?
What are the skills that candidate should have and what should have they achieved?

Pro tip: Answering these questions can lead you to candidate persona. Download our free candidate persona template and get started.

Set expectations and timeframe

Hiring manager may not always be aware of the market landscape. It is important that you layout the market landscape for their needs and setup expectations.

You need to inform the hiring manager about how difficult would it be to hire a person that they want. You also need to laydown a timeline and approximate pipeline numbers with your hiring manager.

In setting up expectations, stay on the same page about following things.

How difficult is it to hire the right candidate
What are the channels and costs associated with this
What would be an approximate timeline
What would be the compensation expectation would be for the right candidate
Share the expected pipeline number. Your approximate number on the number of phone screens and number of interviews will help hiring manager visualise your effort. It will also help hiring manager estimate their own efforts and time commitment for this.
Use your past experience to inform the hiring manager on all of the above issues

Get time commitment from the hiring manager

Once you get a requisition, you try pluck out the stars for the position. You engage the passive candidates and convince them to get on a call with great difficulty. However, once you submit the candidates, the hiring manager takes forever to respond and the candidate loses interest. This is the story of every recruiter out there!

Another way you can avoid this is getting a time commitment in advance from your hiring manager. Get your hiring manager and the rest of the hiring team to commit to a set number of interviews and feedback calls every week.

Here’s what a sample intake form would look like.

Sample intake form

For an exercise, I am sharing a sample form with you. Let’s try it for a UX Design Lead you are trying to hire.

What should the ideal candidate will achieve in 30 days?

The ideal candidate would understand the current design process and will be completely integrated with product, design and engineering teams.
Candidate would grasp the current design language and how we see it evolving in the future.
You will collaborate with the product marketing team to push one campaign out of the door and be in the creative control of the campaign

What should the ideal candidate achieve in 90 days?

Conduct 1on1 meetings with the design team
Take charge of Performance Reviews and OKRs of your team
Represent UX team in weekly all hands meetings.
Create a plan to evolve our design language for next 3 years

What would the ideal candidate achieve in 360 days?

A new and improved design language is ready for the product, marketing and everything in between
UX team has evolved and grown to 8 members and you keep your hiring pipeline healthy and churning
You have developed a clear design evolution plan and have an execution strategy in place
You are a member of internal product team that takes charge of final product decisions

What would the recruiting process and timeframe look like?

The recruiting process would involve following steps.

Sourcing and outreach – 130 candidates
Phone screen – 40 candidates
Take home assignment – 30 candidates
Submitted to HM and Phone/Skype interview with the hiring manager – 20 candidates
On-site interview (3 rounds of interviews) – 6 candidates
Reference check – 1 candidate
Offer – 1 candidate

We expect to source around 130 candidates and reachout to them. The entire process, including the start of search and outreach should take close to 7 weeks.

Commitment needed from the hiring team and the hiring manager

It would need about 4 hours/week from the hiring manager over next 7 weeks to review submittals, take home assignments and talk to the candidates. The time commitment would go up and the nature of activity change near the closing stage as we would need to collaborate to get the candidate to accept the offer.

It’s as simple as that. We would love to know if you have any hacks you employ to figure out what hiring managers (really) want.

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