Hold a thirty to forty-five minute kickoff before any sourcing starts. Cover what the person must deliver in year one, the three must-have competencies, what is genuinely optional, the approved pay band, the interview loop with named owners, and feedback turnaround. Leave with a written scorecard and a few real profiles the manager has already agreed are strong.
Six things, in this order. The outcomes: what this person must have delivered twelve months in. The competencies that predict those outcomes, kept to three or four and separated hard from the wish list. The approved compensation range and level, confirmed rather than assumed. The loop: which stage assesses which competency, who runs it, and how fast feedback comes back. The sourcing plan, including where people doing this work sit today. And the calibration mechanism, usually a shortlist review after the first handful of candidates. Anything skipped here resurfaces later as an argument about the bar. Attach the output to the requisition in your [applicant tracking system](/ats) so it survives memory and recruiter handovers.
Force a ranking instead of accepting a list. Ask the manager which requirements they would reject a candidate for on the spot, then cap that list at three or four. Everything else is coachable, transferable or optional, and saying so out loud is the entire point of the exercise. A useful pressure test for each item: what evidence in an interview would prove it, and what does the company lose if the person picks it up in their first quarter instead. Requirements that survive both questions are real. The rest inflate the specification and shrink the pool. This also produces a sharper [job description](/job-descriptions), since you now know which two sentences carry the weight.
Words about an ideal candidate are unreliable. Profiles are not. Before launching the search, put four or five real anonymised profiles in front of the manager and ask them to sort into yes, no and maybe with one line of reasoning each. You will surface disagreements in fifteen minutes that would otherwise take three weeks and several rejected shortlists to find. Repeat the exercise once you have a genuine shortlist. If the manager rejects everyone, the specification, the band or the market read needs another pass, and learning that now is far cheaper. Tools that support [candidate sourcing](/candidate-sourcing-software) make assembling a calibration set quick, though a handful of public profiles works fine.
Both sides make commitments and both get written down. The recruiter commits to a first shortlist by a named date, an agreed number of candidates, and a weekly update. The hiring manager commits to interview availability, a feedback turnaround, and attendance at the calibration review. Name the decision maker explicitly, because unnamed approvers are how offers stall in the final week. Add one line on how the loop handles disagreement: who breaks a tie and on what basis. Send the summary the same day, keep it to a single page, and refer back to it whenever the search drifts. Most later disputes are really disputes about something nobody wrote down here.
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