Run an Intake Call With an Agency Client
When to use it
Qualify a client role before spending two weeks sourcing for a search that was never going to close.
The prompt
Act as an experienced agency recruiter. I have an intake call with {{client company}} for a {{Job Title}} search. WHAT THEY'VE SENT ME: {{the JD, or just the email}} THE TERMS: {{contingent, retained or exclusive; fee; rebate period}} WHO ELSE IS WORKING IT: {{their internal team, other agencies, or unknown}} HISTORY WITH THIS CLIENT: {{new logo, placed before, or a search that went nowhere}} Give me: 1. The questions that qualify the search itself: whether the budget is signed off, who actually decides, how many people they've already rejected and why. 2. The questions that tell me whether I can fill it: realistic range, true must-haves, what they'll flex on, how they compare to what this market pays. 3. The process questions that decide whether my candidates survive it: feedback turnaround, how many stages, who else joins the loop, how fast they can move. 4. The signs in their answers that this is a search to walk away from, stated plainly. 5. What to get agreed in writing before I start, with the exact sentence to use for each. 6. The question most agency recruiters skip and later regret. Direct and commercial. I'm deciding whether to invest my week here, not trying to win them over.
Tip
Ask how many candidates they've already rejected, and why. A client who has turned down six people is telling you either what the bar really is or that nobody there can make a decision, and both change whether you take the search.
How to use it
Paste the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or whichever assistant you use, then replace every {{bracketed}} part with your own detail. The more specific and messier your input, the better the output — a model given raw notes has more to work with than one given a tidy summary you wrote first.
More Hiring Manager Collaboration prompts
Open the full tool for all 87 prompts, the glossary, and the JD decoder.