How to conduct intake meetings: a go-to guide with checklists for recruiters

Imagine buying a piece of expensive furniture for your house or taking your family on a vacation without asking them about their preferences. If it turns out well, you’re rather a soothsayer. But that seldom happens. 

So what do you do to ensure that everyone’s happy including you? You plan ‘together’. You sit with them, enquire about their needs, choices, and expectations well before you begin planning a vacation. 

Intake meetings are just like that. The difference - the goal here is to hire the best fit for a particular role at an organization, and the participants are the recruiter and the hiring manager. It’s like a concerted attempt by the hiring manager and the recruiter to put together a recruiting plan that ensures you have the right ammo to sell a role to potential candidates. 

Why should you care about intake meetings? 

Intake meetings are a great platform for recruiters to challenge the status quo and make an impact towards organizational goals. 

‍Intake meetings help you: 

• Turn ‘you vs me’ into ‘us’ while looking to fill an open role
• Sell the role in the most effective way
• Set clear hiring expectations from the get-go
• Lead to a faster time-to-hire
• Enhance the candidate’s interview experience 
• Minimize job posting edits 
• Ensure a fair approach throughout the recruitment process 
• Reduce the time that otherwise goes into repetitive meetings with hiring managers 

When should you conduct an intake meeting? 

As soon as a job opening is assigned to the recruiting team/personnel. 

What should you include in your intake meetings? 

Short answer: Everything you need to know about a particular job opening. 

Long answer: There’s multiple stages of an intake meeting

1. The pre: where youconduct your research and prepare before you get into the intake meeting
2. During the intake meeting: agenda setting, the questions you ask the hiring manager 
3. After the intake meeting is complete: follow-ups, reporting, etc.

Based on our interactions with veteran recruiters and our very own recruiter-in-chief, Achu, we’ve relooked the usual ways of conducting intake meetings and created a checklist that will help recruiters be confident than ever about running intake meetings and owning up job openings. 

Get the Confident Recruiter’s Intake Meeting Checklist here.  🤝

What should you expect out of an intake meeting? 

• Clear goals for the recruiting process: assessment tests, stages of the interview, people involved in the interview process, 
• A job title and salary budget 
• An agreed timeline to close the role
• Well-defined job responsibilities and skills for the open role
• An ideal candidate profile look like for the particular role
• Expectations in diverstity hiring 

In short, the quality of intake meetings = the quality of hires. 

For recruiters, intake meetings act as a tool to build relationship with hiring managers and lay out clear hiring expectations. 

For hiring managers, intake meetings are like an open forum to share their exact requirements with the recruiter. 

If you’ve read this far, you’re all set for the next job opening (and a family vacation 😀) you’ll be taking care of. 

Happy recruiting! 

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