Hiring Manager Intake

• Vague Candidate Rejections

  Your candidate checked every box. The hiring manager passed, and can’t tell you why.

• Shifting Job Description Requirements

  Every candidate you send changes the job. First it was five years of experience; now it’s industry experience.

• Job Description Doesn’t Match the Hire

  The person they hired looks nothing like the job description you searched against.

• Send-Outs Getting Rejected

  You send strong candidates. Few of them ever get an interview.

• Disputed Intake Notes

  The intake left behind your notes, maybe an AI summary, and two memories of the call. When a question comes up, none of them settles it.

• Gut-Feel Recommendations

  You’re confident about the candidate. Nobody, including you, has checked that confidence against what the role actually needs.

• Gaps You Didn’t Flag

  The hiring manager finds the weakness you missed, or saw and didn’t mention.

• The Resume Does All the Talking

  You screened, interviewed and evaluated the candidate. The hiring manager decides from the resume.

• Clients Ask for More Candidates

  Instead of deciding on the candidates you sent, the client wants more to compare.

Each of these looks like a different problem. They’re the same one: a decision the hiring manager hasn’t made, or hasn’t owned.

The job description is the company’s public marketing for the role. It rarely says what the hiring manager will actually use to choose between two qualified people: the business problem the hire has to solve, what success looks like a year in, what they’ll train and what must be there on day one, and the dealbreaker nobody wrote down.

When intake captures the job description instead of that decision, the hiring manager makes the decision later, while reviewing your candidates. Each rejection is them discovering what they want. You pay for that discovery in weeks of search time and in the client’s confidence in you.

It isn’t bad luck, and it isn’t this client.

The fix happens at intake. Getting agreement is cheapest before the first candidate. A structured hiring manager intake forces the decision up front:

• Why does this role exist? What business problem is the hire solving?
• What are the hiring manager’s real priorities, ranked?
• What would disqualify someone, including what’s not in the job description?
• What should this person have accomplished by the end of year one?
• Who else has a say, or a veto?
• Is the hire funded and needed now, and is anyone inside already in the running?

Get the answers in writing, play them back, and get the hiring manager to sign off. Once they’ve agreed to it, they own it: it’s the standard every candidate is measured against, and the one they’re accountable to.