A hiring manager intake meeting usually ends with a better job description, and that's the wrong output. The job description goes to candidates. What you need from the hiring manager is how to tell two candidates apart, and most intakes never get there because nobody asks. This is for recruiters running intakes across several functions at once (sales, CS, product, ops, engineering), often in the same week. You'll get a 30-minute agenda you can copy, a test for sorting every requirement the manager gives you, and a way to leave the room with your phone screen and a work-sample task already written.
My bias, up front. Skillvee is a 60-minute "day at work" simulation that replaces the recruiter phone screen and the first interview round. The candidate solves a real challenge, talks to AI teammates to get the information they need, and defends their decisions on a call, while the screen is recorded. So I care a lot about what happens in the intake, because everything we build for a role starts from it. The template below works whether you use us or not.
What a hiring manager intake meeting is for
The intake has one job: agree how you'll recognize the right person before you've met anyone. The logistics matter (comp, location, timeline, interviewers), but they're the easy half and most templates cover them well.
The hard half is that hiring managers describe people in adjectives. Strategic. Scrappy. Customer-obsessed. A self-starter. Each one sounds like a requirement and none of them tells you what to listen for on a call. If you take the adjectives back to your desk, you'll screen on your own reading of "strategic," the manager will reject on theirs, and you'll find out three candidates later.
A useful bar for when you're done: you could hand the screen to another recruiter and they'd advance the same people you would.
The task test: sort every requirement before you write it down
The move I'd make the center of every intake is simple. For each requirement the manager names, ask one question:
"Where in the first 90 days would I see this?"
Then sort the answer into one of three columns.
- Knockout. It's binary and you can check it in a sentence: authorized to work here, has carried a quota, can be in the office two days a week. These are pass/fail and never get scored.
- Signal. The manager can name a task where it shows up. Write the task down, and next to it what good looks like when someone does it. These are the only requirements that belong on a scorecard.
- Preference. The manager can't name a task. It's an adjective, a pedigree, a years-of-experience number nobody can defend. It stays off the scorecard. You can still source toward it, but don't let it decide anything.
On a customer success manager req, the sorting looks like this, with the kind of list a CS lead tends to bring:
| What the manager says | "Where would I see it in 90 days?" | Column |
|---|---|---|
| "Has managed enterprise accounts" | "That's a yes or no. They have or they haven't" | Knockout (check it on the screen) |
| "Strategic" | "In the first QBR they run, they'll tell the customer something the customer didn't ask about" | Signal: the QBR |
| "Proactive about churn" | "One of their first renewals is quietly at risk and nobody's flagged it" | Signal: the at-risk renewal |
| "Great communicator" | Pause. "I guess the QBR again?" | Signal: folded into the QBR |
| "From a SaaS startup" | "I don't know, they'd just get it faster" | Preference |
| "5+ years in CS" | "Honestly, someone with three who's done renewals is fine" | Preference |
Six requirements, and only two tasks worth scoring: one knockout, two signals with communication folded into the QBR, and two preferences. In my experience a manager's list gets shorter under this question and they accept the result, because it's their own answers doing the cutting.
The 30-minute recruiter intake meeting template
Send the job description a day ahead and ask the manager to read it. Then run this. The times add up to 30 minutes.
INTAKE: [Role], [Team] Manager: [Name] Date: [Date]
0:00-5:00 WHY NOW
"Why is this role open now? If someone had it before, what did
they find hardest?"
Output: the honest hard part of the job, in one sentence.
5:00-15:00 THE TASK TEST
For each requirement: "Where in the first 90 days would I see this?"
Sort: KNOCKOUT (pass/fail) / SIGNAL (task + what good looks like)
/ PREFERENCE (off the scorecard)
15:00-22:00 THE TASK
"Of those signal tasks, which one would tell you the most if you
watched someone do it?"
"What would they have to find out, and from whom, to do it well?"
"What does a version you'd be happy with look like? A mediocre one?"
Output: one task, the information it depends on, good vs mediocre.
22:00-27:00 THE SCREEN
"Which one knockout would make you reject an otherwise great
candidate?" -> K5
"What's one question about a past event that gets at the task?"
-> S3, plus what a 4 sounds like
"What gets someone to the next round?" -> advance rule
27:00-30:00 PROCESS
Rounds and who runs each. Feedback within [24/48] hours.
Debrief date for the first batch.
From the first block through the 22-27 block, the intake produces the same four brackets the recruiter phone screen template asks you to fill with the manager before the first call: the hard part (from the why-now block), then the one must-have for K5, the S3 question with what a 4 sounds like, and the advance rule. If you've been running that as a separate 15-minute calibration, this folds it into the intake.
Intake meeting questions that get past the job description
Most of the questions in the template do one thing: they ask about a real event or a specific task instead of a quality. A few I'd keep in your back pocket for when the manager stays abstract:
- "Think of the best person you've had in a role like this. What did they do in their first month that others didn't?"
- "Who would this person have to get information from that they won't get unless they ask?"
- "What's a mistake you'd forgive in month one, and one you wouldn't?"
- "If two finalists are equal on everything else, what breaks the tie?"
The second one is the most useful, and in my experience the one recruiters ask least. Most real work depends on something the new hire doesn't know yet and has to go find out: the renewal risk only the champion knows about, the pricing exception sales promised, the data the ops team keeps in a spreadsheet. I've argued in the work sample test examples piece that a work sample only measures the work if the candidate can't finish it without asking someone for something. The intake is where you find out what that something is.
One hiring manager intake form, six different reqs
If you carry a mixed req list, run the same form for every role. What changes is the answers, and that's useful: after a quarter you've got a set of tasks per function you can reuse. Here's roughly what the 15-22 block tends to produce for the roles I see most:
| Role | The task the manager usually picks | What they'd have to find out |
|---|---|---|
| Account executive | Run discovery on an inbound lead and set a real next step | From the champion: who else signs off, and what the budget really is |
| SDR | Research five accounts and write the first touch for one | Which accounts the AE they support actually wants meetings with |
| Customer success manager | Prep for a renewal that looks fine | What the champion hasn't said in writing |
| Product manager | Decide what to cut from a late release | What sales promised the customer that isn't in the spec |
| Operations / bizops | Find out why a weekly report doesn't match finance's number | Which team's definition is the one leadership uses |
| Engineer | Fix a bug in a codebase they've never seen | What the person who wrote that code assumed |
Every answer in the right-hand column sits with another person or team. That's the part a question bank or a knowledge test can't reproduce, and it's the part I'd build the assessment around.
Where this gets hard
Some managers hate the task test. It feels like being cross-examined about their own team, and a senior manager who's been hiring for ten years may not want a recruiter taking "5+ years" off their scorecard. I'd frame it as the manager's own answers doing the work, which is true, and I'd never cut a requirement in the room without them saying it out loud.
The 90-day window is also a judgment call. For a VP it's too short, since the work that matters shows up in quarter three. Stretch it to a year for senior roles. For an SDR it's probably too long.
And some intakes happen with the job description already posted and twenty applicants in the pipeline. You can still run the task test. It just means the first batch was screened on the old version, and you should say so when the manager asks why the shortlist changed.
What to do with the page after the intake
You leave with one page. The knockouts and the S3 question go straight into your phone screen. The task, the information it depends on, and the good-versus-mediocre line are a work-sample brief: you can run it as a take-home, a live exercise or a case.
Much of that page maps onto what we ask for in Skillvee. You paste the job description with a note on what to emphasize, then edit the rubric and pick from generated challenges or write your own, and the task from your intake is the obvious one to write. If you want to try it on one of your open roles, the pricing page lists the plans, and the job simulation assessment piece covers what to ask any vendor before you buy.