Recruiter Intake Meeting: Agenda, Questions, Sign-off

The intake meeting is where an agency search is won or lost. It happens before you source a single name, and it decides everything that follows. Get it right and your shortlist lands. Get it wrong and you burn a week chasing the wrong profile.

Most intake guides are written for in-house teams. They help a recruiter align with a hiring manager who sits down the hall. On an agency desk the job is different. Your client is external, your margin is at stake, and nobody shares your notes. So your intake has to do more. It has to pin down the role, lock the commercial terms, and produce a written brief both sides agree on.

This guide gives you the agenda by time block, the questions grouped by the risk each one removes, a one-page brief the client signs off, and a checklist for the first 24 hours after the meeting.

Why the agency intake meeting is different from an in-house one

An in-house recruiter and a hiring manager already share a lot. They work for the same employer. They use the same applicant tracking system. They have hired together before, so a shorthand exists. When their brief is thin, they can fix it with a quick chat later in the week.

You do not have that safety net. You meet a client cold, often a founder or an HR lead you have worked with only a few times. A vague brief means extra work that eats into your margin, whether the search is retained or contingent. And the client cannot see your pipeline. They only know what you show them.

That gap is exactly why executive searches fail when the brief is vague. The role was never truly agreed, so the shortlist never matched. Your intake meeting exists to close that gap on day one.

So treat the intake as a working session, not a friendly chat. You leave with three things: a clear picture of the role, agreed commercial terms, and a written brief. Miss any one of them and the search starts on sand.

Your intake agenda, block by block

A senior client will give you thirty to forty-five minutes. Spend it well. Send the job description and your open questions ahead of time, and ask them to fill in what they can. Then the meeting becomes a discussion about gaps and trade-offs, not a slow data dump.

Run the meeting in six short blocks. Each block has one output, so you always know when to move on.

Keep the commercial block early. If the terms do not work, you want to know before you invest the rest of the hour.

The intake questions that protect your fee

Start with money and exclusivity. It feels less comfortable than talking about the role, so recruiters push it to the end and then run out of time. Do the opposite. These answers decide whether the mandate is even worth your desk.

Ask whether the search is exclusive to you or open to other firms. Ask how the fee is structured and when it is due. Ask what happens if the hire leaves inside the guarantee period. Ask who else the client has briefed. The answers change how hard you push and how fast you move.

Anchor these questions in real market terms. If you need a refresher on the models, retained versus contingency search terms explains when exclusivity and upfront fees apply. For a wider view of pricing, how recruitment agency fees are structured covers the common percentages and retainers. Both help you frame the conversation without quoting a number you cannot defend.

Do not skip the budget question either. A client who wants a senior hire on a junior salary is telling you the search will stall. Better to surface that now than after your third rejected shortlist.

Questions that define the role, not just the job title

Job titles lie. Two companies use the same title for very different jobs. So dig past the title into the actual work.

Ask what this person will have shipped or fixed in their first 90 days. That single question turns a wish list into a set of outcomes you can source against. Ask which skills are true must-haves and which are merely nice to have. Push back gently when everything is a must-have, because a role with fifteen non-negotiables cannot be filled.

Then ask about the problem behind the hire. Is this a new seat or a backfill? Is the team growing, or is someone leaving a mess behind? The honest answer shapes the profile more than any competency list. It also tells you how a candidate should pitch the move.

Finish this block with market reality. Tell the client what similar candidates cost and how long similar searches take. A brief built on optimism produces a shortlist the client rejects. A brief built on the market produces one they act on.

Who holds the veto, and how decisions get made

Nothing kills a search faster than a hidden decision-maker. You send a strong shortlist, the hiring manager loves it, and then a founder or a board member you never met vetoes everyone. Weeks gone.

So map the decision chain in the room. Ask who makes the final call. Ask who else has a veto, even an informal one. Ask who sits on the interview panel and what each person cares about. Write the names down.

For senior and confidential mandates, ask about constraints too. Is this a replacement search where the current person does not yet know? Can the company name be shared, or does the approach stay discreet? These constraints shape how you write to candidates and how you protect the client. Executive search lives or dies on this kind of discretion, so agree it explicitly rather than assuming.

When you know who decides, you can tune your shortlist to the people who actually say yes. That is the difference between a search that closes and one that drifts.

The shortlist and update cadence to agree in the room

Clients get nervous in silence. They cannot see your pipeline, so a quiet week reads as no progress, even when you are deep in outreach. Agree the rhythm now and you remove that anxiety for the whole search.

Settle three things. How many profiles make a first shortlist. How often you will update them, and in what format. And what a good update looks like, whether that is a short written note or a fifteen-minute call. Put the dates in the brief so nobody has to chase.

Then add the calibration step, which most recruiters skip. Before you run the full search, share three to five sample profiles for the client to react to. You are not proposing these people. You are testing your read of the brief.

Their reactions tell you whether you aimed right, and they cost you an hour instead of a fortnight. This step is also where a clean brief pays off. You can turn the brief into a talent map and pull calibration profiles straight from it.

The intake question bank, grouped by what each question de-risks

Here is the full question set in one place. Each row names the risk it removes, so you can see why the question earns its spot. Copy it into your own notes and adapt the wording to your client.

You will not use every question on every role. Read the client and pick the ones that matter. The point is to leave no expensive assumption unspoken.

What to lock in writing before you source a single name

A meeting that stays in your head is a meeting you will misremember. So turn the intake into a one-page brief and send it to the client the same day. Ask them to confirm it before you start. That confirmation is your protection when the target shifts in week three, and it keeps your whole team sourcing the same person.

The brief is short. It records the role and success criteria, the profile split into must-haves and nice-to-haves, the commercial terms, the decision chain, the cadence, the calibration plan, and the dates you agreed. Prose is fine for the summary, but the table below keeps everyone honest.

This signed-off brief is also where the search starts inside your tools. In Leonar, the brief becomes the project. The project settings hold the job description, location, tags, and custom fields, so the whole desk works from one agreed source.

As profiles come in, Leonar ranks the shortlist against that brief. Your client can be given view or feedback access to the pipeline through the client portal. The written intake stops being paperwork and becomes the thing that runs the search.

The first 24 hours after the intake meeting

The intake is not finished when the call ends. The next day decides whether the momentum holds. Work this short checklist while everything is fresh.

• Send the one-page brief for the client to confirm, and ask for a reply by a set date.
• Set up the project so the whole team sources against the same agreed brief.
• Line up your three to five calibration profiles and book the review.
• Confirm the first shortlist date and the update rhythm in writing.
• Note any open question the client still owes you, and chase it politely.

Do this within a day and the client sees a firm that moves. Leave it a week and the brief goes stale, the terms feel open again, and you start the next call re-agreeing things you already agreed.

Turn a good intake into a faster shortlist

A sharp intake meeting is your best unfair advantage. It gives you a brief the client actually agreed to, terms that protect your fee, and a cadence that keeps them calm. From there the search is just execution.

Leonar is built to carry that brief into the search. If you run retained or confidential mandates, see how the workflow fits a retained and executive search desk. If you run a mixed book of clients, the same tools support a broader agency recruiting workflow, from the intake brief through to the client portal. When you are ready to compare plans, the Leonar pricing page lays them out in full.

Frequently asked questions

What is a recruiter intake meeting?

It is the first working session between a recruiter and the client who owns the role. You use it to agree what good looks like, who decides, and how the search will run, before you source a single name. On an agency desk the intake also sets the commercial terms. You confirm exclusivity, the fee model, replacement terms, and the shortlist cadence. The output is a written brief both sides agree on. Skip it, and you build a shortlist against your own guesses instead of the client's real need.

What questions should an agency recruiter ask at a client intake meeting?

Group your questions by the risk each one removes. Commercial questions cover exclusivity, the fee model, replacement terms, and who else is on the search. Role questions cover success in the first 90 days, must-haves versus nice-to-haves, and the problem the hire solves. Decision questions cover who holds the veto and who sits on the panel. Process questions cover the shortlist size, the update cadence, and the format. Ask the commercial questions first. They protect your fee and tell you whether the mandate is worth your time.

How long should an intake meeting be?

Thirty to forty-five minutes is enough when every block has a clear output. Send the job description and your open questions ahead of time. Ask the client to fill in what they can. That turns the meeting into a discussion about gaps and trade-offs, not a form-filling exercise. A tight agenda keeps a senior client engaged and respects their time. If the role is unusually complex or confidential, book a second short session rather than stretching the first one past an hour.

What should you agree in writing after an intake meeting?

Write a one-page summary the client signs off before you source. It records the role and success criteria, the must-have and nice-to-have profile, the commercial terms, who holds the veto and the approval chain, the shortlist size and update cadence, and the calibration step. Add the dates you both agreed. This written brief is your protection if the target moves later. It also becomes the working brief your team sources against, so everyone chases the same candidate, not six different ones.

How is an agency intake meeting different from an in-house one?

An in-house recruiter and hiring manager share an employer, an applicant tracking system, and a history. An agency recruiter starts cold with an external client, agreed search commitments, and a margin to protect. So the agency intake carries extra weight. You have to make the brief explicit because you cannot lean on shared context. You have to lock the commercial terms because your margin rides on them. And you have to agree a cadence, because the client cannot see your pipeline unless you show it to them.