Turning a Vague Hiring Request into Observable Selection Criteria

“Strong communicator” tells a recruiter little about whom to search for. Before sourcing, ask the manager which conversation the hire must handle, what a good outcome would look like and how a candidate could show they have done comparable work. The answer may reveal an essential skill, a preference or an assumption left over from an old job description.

Why Dana refuses to source from adjectives

In the fictional Aster Home Goods brief, Dana cannot search for a “strong marketing lead” until the manager explains the budget the hire will control and which e-commerce work the hire must own. It is tempting to treat this as a fifteen-minute box to tick, especially when the manager is busy and wants candidates fast. In practice, that shortcut is what produces the vague brief in the first place: the recruiter ends up inferring what "strong communicator" or "senior enough" means, and finds out the guess was wrong only when the first shortlist comes back rejected.

There is also a structural reason to slow down here. Research on selection interviews shows that interviews with a higher degree of structure produce higher validity, better rater reliability, better rater agreement, and less adverse impact than unstructured ones (U.S. Office of Personnel Management). For Dana, the interview research is a reason to ask for examples of budget decisions and campaign presentations, then use those situations when the team meets candidates. It does not prove that her intake alone will improve hiring outcomes. Questions built around specific job competencies, identified through job analysis rather than generic traits, show the strongest validity and rater agreement (OPM). The intake meeting is where that job analysis actually happens, even if nobody calls it that.

How Dana tests the manager’s assumptions

Ask for the profile behind the adjectives

Ask for the job title and job description before the meeting, and read it closely enough to start forming your own picture of the candidate rather than walking in blank (Recruitee). In the meeting, ask for examples of past hires or resumes the manager liked. This is usually the single most useful question in the whole conversation, because it moves the discussion from an abstract list of adjectives to a concrete profile (Recruitee). When a manager says "someone like the person who just left" or "not another one like the last hire," do not accept the impression. Ask them to point to a specific behavior or decision that made that person work or not work.

Keep budget ownership, question the agency label

Dana starts with the contradiction in the manager’s own examples: the admired hire worked in-house for five years, yet the brief demands eight years and agency experience. She asks which task actually needs an agency background and which requires prior budget ownership. The "why" is doing the real work here. A requirement the manager cannot justify on the spot is a strong candidate for the nice-to-have column, whatever list it started in. This is also where you probe skills and competencies deeply enough to separate what is genuinely required for success from what is simply preferred (Recruitee).

Sourcing data can usefully inform this split, though it should not replace the manager's judgment. If the market shows very few candidates hold a given certification, that is a reasonable argument for treating it as something a new hire could obtain after joining rather than a hard filter (JobScore). It is also worth actively challenging requirements that combine contradictory skill sets, demand more years of experience than the technology in question has existed, merge two distinct roles into one job, or set unnecessarily high bars. These are recognizable signs of a brief describing an impossible "perfect" candidate rather than a real one (JobScore).

Turn “culture fit” into a situation to discuss

In Dana’s brief, “budget ownership” becomes useful only when a candidate can explain which budget they managed and what decisions they made with it. "Culture fit" and "strong leadership" fail this test. "Has led a cross-functional team of at least four people through a product launch" or "can describe a specific instance of resolving conflict between two direct reports" pass it. When the manager talks about culture, push them to define what "culture add" means in terms of observable behaviors and work preferences, not a feeling they get from a conversation (JobScore).

Send a brief the manager can actually correct

Treat the list you leave the intake meeting with as a draft, not a finished brief. It is likely to change as the manager reflects and gives feedback, so be ready to adjust it rather than defend the first version (Recruitee). Once you have a revised version, write down the meeting notes, the agreed criteria and priorities, who owns which step, the timeline, and any open questions. Documentation like this prevents misunderstandings and gives everyone a shared reference point later, when memories of the original conversation have faded (JobScore). Send it back to the manager and get explicit confirmation before you open sourcing. A brief nobody has confirmed in writing is still, in effect, a vague brief.

Fictional example: from "a strong marketing lead" to a workable brief

The following is a fictional, illustrative scenario, not a real search or candidate.

A hiring manager at a fictional mid-size retailer, "Aster Home Goods," tells recruiter Dana: "We need a strong marketing lead who can hit the ground running." In the intake meeting, Dana asks for the job description and a resume of someone the manager admired, then works through the must-have and nice-to-have questions one by one. The manager's first list: eight-plus years of experience, agency background, e-commerce expertise, people management, budget ownership, and "great culture fit."

Dana pushes on each item. It turns out the resume the manager liked belonged to someone with five years of in-house experience, not eight, so the number was aspirational rather than essential and gets dropped to five. "Agency background" turns out to be shorthand for "comfortable pitching creative ideas to executives," which Dana rewrites as "can describe two examples of presenting a campaign concept to senior leadership." "Great culture fit" becomes "collaborates well with a small, fast-moving team and is comfortable revising plans weekly," something Dana can actually probe for in an interview. "Budget ownership" survives as a genuine non-negotiable, because the manager can point to a specific budget the hire would control. The revised brief ends up with five observable must-haves, two nice-to-haves, and no arbitrary years-of-experience floor. Dana emails the list back to the manager for confirmation before sourcing starts.

Where this method still falls short

In Dana’s fictional search, the manager may later insist on agency experience again. Dana should ask which task requires it and record the answer before changing the brief; otherwise the team would reject candidates against a preference it had already dropped. A clearly worded criterion is also not a verified one: a claim about leading a launch still needs a concrete example or work sample.

If Dana finds few people who have owned both the budget and the e-commerce work, she should bring the evidence back to the manager rather than quietly relax either filter. They can decide which responsibility can be learned after hiring and which must be demonstrated now. The written brief helps only if Dana and the manager return to it when they discuss actual profiles; it cannot make that judgment for them.

For the Aster Home Goods example, the most useful outcome is a record of why budget ownership stayed essential while the agency label did not. That decision can be revisited when the first shortlist reaches the manager, without pretending the initial brief was perfect.