The intake call that decides the whole search

A search that goes wrong usually went wrong in the first hour, and the first hour is the one nobody protects.

Ask a recruiter why a search stalled and you will hear about the market. Sometimes that is true. More often the search was mis-specified on day one, everyone worked hard against the wrong target for three weeks, and the market took the blame.

The intake call is the cheapest point of intervention in the entire process. An hour there saves a fortnight later, and it is the only hour where the hiring manager is obliged to think rather than react.

The job description is not the brief

The document you are sent lists every attribute anybody in the hiring team mentioned, with no weighting and no trade-offs. It is a committee artefact. It will tell you the candidate needs seven years, three technologies, a degree, and to be a self-starter.

What you need is different: if I can only bring you one person, what makes them the one? That question cannot be answered by a list, because the answer is a ranking, and rankings only come out under forced choice.

The five questions that produce a brief

1. 1“Who did this before, and what happened to them?”A vacancy exists for a reason. Promoted, left, was let go, or the role is new — each implies a different search and a different pitch. If the last person was pushed out, ask what they were missing; that is the real requirement, and it is rarely in the job description. If the role is new, ask who is doing the work today, because that person is your benchmark and possibly your candidate.
2. 2“What will they have delivered ninety days in?”This converts a list of attributes into work. A manager who cannot answer it has not thought the role through, and that is worth knowing before you source. The answer also gives you the single best line for approaching passive candidates — people respond to a problem to solve far more than to a list of requirements they already meet.
3. 3The forced choice, asked four or five times“Two candidates, identical except one has eight years in the industry and the other has four but has shipped exactly the thing you are building. Who do you see first?” Then vary the pair — depth against breadth, domain against craft, someone cheaper and rawer against someone at the top of band. Each answer is a weight. Four or five of them is a rubric.
4. 4“Which of these would genuinely end it?”Read the must-haves back and ask which ones are actually disqualifying. Right to work, a licence the job legally requires, a hard location constraint — those are real. “Seven years” almost never is, and treating it as one throws away the person with six who would have got the job. A manager who insists everything is a knockout is telling you the brief is not agreed internally, which is a different problem and worth surfacing now.
5. 5“Who else says yes, and how fast can they?”Names, order, and availability. Not the process in theory — the actual diaries. A four-stage process with a panel member who travels every other week is a six-week process, and you should say so in the room rather than discover it when a candidate accepts elsewhere.

Test the salary before you leave

The most common failure is not an unreasonable requirement or an unreasonable budget. It is the pair of them, held by people who have never put them next to each other.

Do it in the room. Take the requirement as agreed, name two or three real people you know at that level — no names, just shape and current package — and say what they are paid. If the band does not reach, you have three options and the manager picks one:

• Move the money. Sometimes available, especially if you have made the gap concrete rather than theoretical.
• Move the requirement. Drop the domain, take the person with four years and the exact stack, plan to train.
• Move something else. Remote days, title, scope, a faster process. These are worth real money to candidates and cost the client less than salary.

Having that conversation on day one is an awkward twenty minutes. Having it on day twenty-one, with a rejected shortlist as evidence, costs you the search and some of the relationship.

Leave with four things written down

Not notes. A short document you send back the same day, because the act of confirming it in writing is what makes it binding enough to refer to in week three.

• The ranked requirement — what is disqualifying, what is weighted and how heavily, what cannot be read off a CV and will be asked at screening instead.
• The ninety-day outcome, in the manager's own words. This is your approach message.
• The package, tested — range, plus what else is movable.
• The decision process — names, order, target turnaround at each stage.

That document does two jobs. It is the specification you screen against, so two recruiters on the same role apply the same bar. And it is the thing you hold up in week three when the feedback starts drifting — not to win an argument, but to make the drift explicit and get the brief formally changed rather than informally ignored.

The brief will change. That is fine.

Around the third week, the market answers. Candidates who match the brief turn out not to exist at that salary, or they exist and are not interested, or the manager meets someone who reframes what they want.

This is normal and not a failure of intake. The failure is when it happens silently — when the bar moves and nobody records that it moved, so the candidates rejected in week one were judged against rules that no longer apply and nobody can reconstruct why.

So treat a brief like a version, not a document. When it changes, say so, write the new one, date it, and note what changed. The cost is five minutes. The benefit is that six months later, when somebody asks why a particular person did not get a call, there is an answer that is not a recollection.

Common questions