Improve The Intake Meeting Template

The most pressing issue that the intake meeting deals with is ensuring good candidates do not walk away halfway through the recruitment process.

During times of low unemployment rates, the job market belongs to talented candidates. They can be more choosy about the roles they desire, and also the organizations they wish to work for. They will not wait for you to clear the roadblocks your recruitment process has. With that in mind, it is obvious that time costs you great candidates. By asking lots of questions during the arranging of the intake meeting, you can save a great deal of time.

This workflow will allow you to look ahead and identify any future roadblocks. Some of the process steps it covers include:

• Questions you should ask the hiring manager
• Your communications strategy
• Agreeing on interview dates
• Deciding who will be on your interview panel

This optimized workflow, and nearly a thousand like it, show how Process Street can simplify your working processes and make life easy.

Usually, the meeting should be between HR and the hiring manager, but always ask the hiring manager if they want to invite more people. A good suggestion is to invite employees the candidate will be working with if they get the job.

What is the usual salary for this position? Is it a popular remote job? Is the skillset niche? Where are the best online places to find candidates: LinkedIn etc?

Summarise your research onto one page, if possible, and bring copies of it for everyone in the meeting.

Look at the job role in its simplest terms. You are looking to figure out the overall purpose of the job position. You can start by asking four simple questions:

Your first point of contact in arranging the intake meeting should be the hiring manager. You will need to research their department and the job that they themselves are currently doing. A good start would be to ask the following questions:

A bottleneck is caused when workloads arrive too quickly for the production process to handle.

This term is important because it highlights that the most dangerous bottleneck for you is concerning the time your processes take to complete. This is especially important during the recruitment process. The following tasks outline how to eliminate wasted time, and reduce candidate waiting times.

Ghosting is the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone. It is happening to a lot of recruiters when dealing with candidates who have applied for a vacancy.

One firm in America reported that in one year they encountered a nearly 20% increase in candidates ghosting them. In recent research, 28% of candidates have openly admitted to ghosting employers. 

The main reasons for this occurring seem to be:

• An employment market offering many job vacancies
• A global remote job market offering virtual interviews

With the above in mind, you need to ensure your processes are fast and simple. You can start with time-specific processes. Ensure you have up-to-date contact details for those involved in the interview process, regardless of whether they are candidates or members of the interview panel.

It’s also worth it to create standing reminders, calls, or calendar invites. This ensures you know who will be contacting the candidates and how often. It also saves time on canceled interviews because the candidate found another employer and didn’t let you know. You can even elect someone to contact candidates, every so often, to keep them in the loop.

During the intake meeting, you will need to discuss how you intend to acquire candidates for the vacancy. If they are remote candidates, you can also discuss how to test them. You can start by asking:

Make sure to keep a list of all the essential and desirable skills for the vacancy — but also to whittle them down into a shorter list if needed. Check if the hiring manager can bring the résumé of the last person in the position — this might indicate the qualities of the perfect candidate. You can work from this and even discuss the key people skills that made the last person good for the role, or where they might have improved.

Divide your next steps into:

Again, to prevent bottlenecks and ghosting, be clear about when the interviews will take place. Will they be two or three weeks after the intake meeting date? Factor in when your vacancy advertisement will go out: at the end of the month?

You also need to decide how many candidates will be in the final round of interviews.

Ensure that any projects are not going to take two months to complete. Again, speed is the name of the game and potential talent may accept offers elsewhere.

Look at how you can streamline the process, making it faster and simpler. You want to retain talented candidates, so choose tests that are specific to what the job will involve doing. Pre-interview tests are especially important as they can eliminate unsuitable applicants.

Some organizations often fail to attract suitable candidates to interview as they fail to use accurate methods to assess candidates for hire or promotion.

During the intake meeting, you can decide on who will be interviewing candidates. If you have taken the previous step of making clear what the job involves, it should be clear who would be suitable to be in charge of interviews. 

It is advisable to incorporate a checklist, better yet an optimized workflow, to run through the tasks involved in the interview process. Ask those attending the intake meeting if they have experience in interviewing candidates. You may also consider putting training in place if there are members in the meeting who do not know how to interview.

If anyone needs to cancel, the interview must still go ahead to retain the interest of talented candidates. Don’t create a bad impression on the day, be prepared for people to pull out due to sickness and personal reasons.

Make a list of those who could step in to help if needed.

• Sarah Sipek - How to Conduct an Intake Meeting
• Bill Stauffer - In This Candidates’ Market, Speed Is The Name Of The Game

• Heidi Lynne Kurter - Employers: Here Are 3 Reasons Why Candidates Are GhostingYou

• Samantha McLaren - LinkedIn’s Head of Recruiting Shares the Checklist His Team Uses to Get the Most Out of Every Intake Meeting

• Bradford D. Smart Ph.D. - Topgrading

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