Intake meeting
An intake meeting is the conversation between recruiter and hiring manager at the start of a search, establishing what the role genuinely requires, what an ideal candidate looks like, and how the process will run.
The highest-value question is usually: what would make you reject an otherwise excellent candidate? It surfaces the real non-negotiables, which frequently differ from what is written in the job description.
Skipping the intake is a leading cause of a search restarting after four weeks of interviewing the wrong profile.