What is an intake meeting?
An intake meeting is the conversation at the start of a search in which a recruiter and a hiring manager agree what is actually being looked for. It happens before any sourcing, and everything that follows is shaped by it.
It is not a handover of a job specification. A specification lists requirements; an intake meeting establishes which of them are real.
What has to come out of an intake meeting?
Five things, and the first two are the ones usually skipped. Why the role is open, because a replacement, a new function and a role someone left in frustration are three different searches. Which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable, as opposed to copied from a template.
Then the practical ground: who the person will work with and for, what the interview process and timeline actually are, and what the package is. A search that starts without a package range is a search that will lose its best candidate at the offer stage.
How is an intake meeting different from an intake process?
The words overlap and the things do not. An intake meeting is a briefing between two people about one role. An intake process, in the sense used in a managed service programme, is the standardised route by which a requisition is submitted and distributed to suppliers, as described in the Sparagus guide to what MSP recruitment looks like day to day.
One is a conversation about substance, the other is a workflow. Confusing them tends to produce programmes with excellent intake mechanics and briefs nobody ever interrogated.
Why do searches fail at the intake?
Because the disagreement is usually inside the client rather than between the client and the recruiter. Two stakeholders want different people, nobody has said so out loud, and the brief that emerges is an average of two incompatible roles.
A recruiter who surfaces that in the intake saves weeks. One who does not will produce a shortlist that satisfies neither stakeholder and be told the market is difficult. Sparagus treats the brief as part of the mandate rather than an input to it, within its recruitment mandates across technology, engineering and business.
