What is an intake meeting?
An intake meeting is the first meeting of a hiring process. The recruiter, in-house or at an agency, sits down with the hiring manager, or with the client for an agency search, to turn "we need someone" into precise criteria.
It settles three things: the role (mission, responsibilities, conditions, pay), the profile (must-have and nice-to-have skills, experience) and the process (stages, interviewers, timelines, who decides). Everything else flows from it: the job posting, the Boolean search, the interview scorecard.
Why does the intake meeting matter?
A poorly framed search shows late, and it is expensive: candidates presented then rejected because "it's not quite it", criteria that change midway, a role that stays open for weeks. A serious intake meeting is the simplest way to cut time to fill.
It is also a fairness moment. Criteria written before seeing a single resume are harder to bend toward a profile someone "likes". And it is the right time to separate true requirements from comfort: demanding a degree or "Canadian experience" the work does not need screens out capable people. In Ontario, since 2026, public job postings from employers with 25 or more employees can no longer require Canadian experience.
Concrete example
A staffing firm in Ottawa gets a search: "a bilingual administrative assistant". In a 30-minute intake, the role takes shape: supporting two partners at an accounting firm, calendar management, preparing tax documents in peak season, fluent written French. Must-have: Outlook and Excel, two years in a professional firm. Nice-to-have: TaxCycle. Pay: range confirmed. Process: two interviews, decision within ten days, an answer to every interviewed candidate.
Without that conversation, the firm would have searched for a generalist assistant and presented candidates with no firm experience.
Best practices
- Bring a question list: why the role is open, what success looks like after six months, what the previous person lacked.
- Separate must-have from nice-to-have. Three to five must-haves at most.
- Confirm the pay range, especially where the law requires posting it, as in Ontario or British Columbia.
- Set the process and response times, including for rejected candidates.
- Send a written summary to the manager or client and get it approved.
The free tool From call notes to search turns your intake notes into a ready-to-post job ad, a scorecard, interview questions, a Boolean string and an outreach message.
Common mistakes
- Accepting a copied job description without questioning it.
- Marking everything as a must-have. The pool empties and the role stays open.
- Not deciding who answers rejected candidates, and when. That is often where ghosting starts.
- Writing nothing down. Without an approved summary, everyone remembers the meeting their own way.
- Skipping the intake for 'easy' roles. Those are exactly the searches where assumptions go unchallenged.
With RecruitEasy
Once the brief is approved, RecruitEasy helps you create the job from it, publish it and see who in your database already fits, with the reason. See assisted job creation.