Prep Questions for an Intake Meeting
When to use it
Walk into a kickoff ready to extract a real brief, not a title and a salary band.
The prompt
Act as a recruiter who has run hundreds of intake calls. I have one for a {{Job Title}} opening with {{hiring manager's name and role}}. WHAT I ALREADY HAVE: {{paste the req, an old JD, Slack messages, anything}} WHY I THINK THE ROLE IS OPEN: {{growth, backfill, or "not sure"}} WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THIS MANAGER: {{first time hiring, hires often, burned by a bad hire, moves slowly}} HOW THEIR LAST HIRE WENT: {{if known}} Give me: 1. Ten questions in the order I should ask them, opening with the work rather than the logistics. 2. For each, one sentence on what a bad answer sounds like, so I know when to push instead of moving on. 3. Three questions specifically for the must-have list — the ones that make a manager separate what they need from what they'd like. 4. The question that surfaces how the decision actually gets made, and who else holds a veto. 5. What I should get agreed in the room: level, range, the loop, feedback turnaround, and who writes the JD. 6. Anything in what I pasted that I should verify rather than take at face value. Keep every question short enough to ask out loud without reading it off a screen.
Tip
Leave comp, level and logistics until last. Opening with them signals you're there to process a req rather than understand the role, and managers answer accordingly.
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.