Intake meetings, bad intakes can have terrible outcomes. Catastrophic outcomes and the problem is a lot of recruiters feel like they’re doing a good job with intakes. However, in all my experiences as a consultant and advisor, I have seen time and time again how missing steps or not doing proper, adequate intakes produce really poor results.

So, what is the problem with a bad intake? Well, when you don’t conduct an intake successfully, you have misalignment on the profiles, which means you might be producing candidates that might be quality candidates, but the hiring manager doesn’t want them. So, strong candidates, but not who your organization wants to hire.

You might be looking in the right places but for the wrong people. It also leads to inefficient processes all the way down the workflow and lots of workflow disruption. You might spend weeks trying to find the wrong people, and by the time you figure it out, you start over.

Now the hiring manager is frustrated. Not only have you wasted time, but you’ve also potentially damaged that relationship. You may have also damaged your employer brand because the candidates that you’ve been talking to are all going to get rejected and they’re not really going to understand why because they were never a fit for that job anyway. So, now you have a quality issue as well. Your organization may be forced to hire people they didn’t really want to hire because they don’t have a choice. They’re desperate; they’re at the end of the line. So, this causes a lot of issues.

On the other hand, consider all of the benefits of a good, strong intake. It positions your recruiters as authorities. You show immediate value by coming prepared to the interview, asking the right questions, and being able to drill down.

Hiring managers will be impressed when you do that instead of just taking orders. It also helps you because you know your steps to create a strategy and to avoid contact collision and to separate the duties of the different parties.

You can also organize the process for others as well, and this allows you in the intake to gather all the right keywords that you’re going to need to validate to make sure that you’re getting the right candidates. And finally, this is where you set timelines and manage expectations.

Part of the circle of the intake meeting is the pre-search. This is what you do before you go on the search, before you even show up to the meeting with the hiring manager—you are prepared.
What should you bring to that meeting?
Here are a few things.

Bring the names of a few competitors, but not just competitors based on the market; find competitors that hire similar talent. You want competitors for talent, not competitors for customers.

Also, bring some similar companies as well. Competitors and like companies. You also want to bring names of job titles for this position—what are they called elsewhere, especially at those competitors, and what alternative job titles are synonymous with them. Bring a list of these, maybe 10 or so.

What happens during the intake? You might run down this list, and by giving the examples, the hiring manager will have an idea and they will be able to give you some more names of job titles. You want to bring some additional keywords, so take the keywords that are in the requirements and look up alternatives in places like a dictionary.

Also, bring with you the names of niche communities, websites, job boards, career sites —things like that you want to bring up in a call. You might not need them, but it’s good to have them in your pre-search. List any relevant organizations, associations, standard bodies, certifications standards, maybe conferences and events.

Ideally, if you filled the position before, bring the top few candidates from that req so you can use it as an example. That would be very good. Or maybe the backgrounds of some other people that have been interviewed for a position just like this before. Finally, you want to bring some suggestions for alternative technologies or things that might be useful for that candidate to do their job. For example, if it is a particular type of software, are there any competitive software options that you might want to bring to that meeting and use as keywords or to validate. What we want to do with all this—okay, we’ll talk about that in the next part.