How to brief a recruiter so the shortlist is actually short
The one-hour conversation that saves you thirty CVs, and the questions your recruiter should be asking you.
Most searches are lost in the first ten minutes, before a single CV moves. A JD gets forwarded, someone says “urgent,” and the machinery starts. Thirty CVs later, everyone wonders why nothing fits.
The JD is not the brief. The JD is what the role looked like on paper, usually written for a previous occupant, sometimes copied from a competitor’s posting. The brief is the job as it actually is — and getting to it takes about an hour of honest conversation. Fifteen years of taking demanding client briefs in advertising teach a simple lesson: this hour decides the search. Here is what should happen in it.
What a proper brief covers
Why the seat is open. Not the sanitised version. Did the last person leave, and if so, towards what and away from what? Was the role outgrown, or did the role outgrow the person? A vacancy created by a promotion and a vacancy created by a quiet firing are different searches wearing the same JD.
What the first ninety days must produce. Not responsibilities — outcomes. “Own the northern region P&L” is a responsibility. “Stop the bleeding in two key accounts by Diwali” is an outcome. Candidates who can do the second exist in far smaller numbers than candidates who can claim the first.
Who succeeds in your rooms. Every company has a texture. Some run on consensus, some on combat, some on founder gravity. The brilliant operator who thrives in one dies in another. If your last two exits were “great on paper, never landed,” this is almost always where the mismatch lived.
The compensation truth. Not the band HR published — the number you’d actually pay for the right person, and the number at which you’d walk away. A recruiter who doesn’t know the real range will waste your time at both ends of it.
The non-negotiables, separated from the preferences. Most JDs list fifteen requirements. Usually three are real. A good brief conversation forces the separation, because every fake requirement shrinks the candidate pool for no return.
The questions your recruiter should be asking you
If the person taking your brief doesn’t ask most of these, you’ve learned something important before spending a rupee:
- What happened to the last person in this seat?
- What will this person have done in six months for you to call the hire a success?
- Who interviews, who decides, and who can veto?
- What’s the honest range — and what would make you stretch it?
- Which companies would you hire from tomorrow, and which never?
- What’s broken right now that this person walks into?
Notice these are questions about your company, not about the candidate market. That’s the point. Matching happens later; understanding comes first.
What this hour buys you
A recruiter who has taken this brief can look at a CV and know in ninety seconds whether the person belongs in the conversation. That’s how a shortlist gets short: not by filtering harder, but by understanding earlier.
It also buys you honesty in the other direction. Sometimes the brief conversation reveals that the role as imagined doesn’t exist in the market at that compensation — better to renegotiate the role in week one than discover it in month three, twenty CVs deep.
Inside Cubicle won’t start a search without this conversation. Not as a policy flourish — because starting without it means guessing, and you can get guessing anywhere.
Amrita HazariFounder, Inside Cubicle
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