# 001 How to Conduct a Kickoff Meeting to Fill a Job Position Faster — Part 1

Are you one of those recruiters who start sourcing candidates’ profiles right after receiving a new requisition(req) without discussing it in detail with your hiring manager?

If yes, then you are reading the right article to understand why it is high time for you to pause, comprehend the requirement and educate the hiring manager about the new req.

Conducting a well-planned kickoff meeting with your hiring manager prior to sourcing is crucial for filling a job position faster. This can be achieved by targeting the right candidates and by building credibility with your manager.

In Part 1, you will get the real-life tips for approaching the right candidates, whereas in Part 2, you will get the actionable ideas for creating trust with your hiring manager.

Before we get into the details of Part 1, let’s first understand what the kickoff meeting is all about.

It’s a meeting between the hiring manager and the recruiter to strategize a fulfillment plan for a newly opened req. Both functions collaborate and share a responsibility to serve their business, and in turn, the company.

Apparently, kickoff meetings are talent acquisition initiated and should ideally be conducted on the same day the req is opened, as most companies measure their recruiters’ performances by how much time they take to fill an open req.

I have six key strategies for organizing a well-planned kickoff meeting with your hiring manager.

Use the following first three strategies during the kickoff meeting to reach out to the best candidates for an open req. We will talk about the other three strategies in Part 2 of this article.

Strategy #1 Ask your Hiring Manager questions:

Most recruiters work on ongoing requisitions, and they assume that there is no need to conduct a kickoff meeting as they know the req, the company and its culture quite well.

Most often, I have seen that the job descriptions (JD) for ongoing roles are written once and are referred to repeatedly whenever any such positions open. However, anything may change over time. For instance, you may have a new hiring manager, or the client may have changed the existing requirement and so on.

Thus, it is important to re-verify a JD with the hiring manager for any changes to have an accurate reflection of what the job entails. When you discuss a JD line-by-line, sometimes your hiring manager realizes that most of the stuff is redundant or generalized.

To make it concise and specific to the required job, you work your way along with them.

1.1 Role-related questions: We ask a hiring manager about a client or project name, location if onsite or remote, company-paid travel (if any), and the budget to hire, but most often, we forget to ask the key questions to know the business well. These questions are as follows:

(a) Is the open requisition an expansion or a replacement? This will give you some insights about the team, such as if they are ramping up the business, and what additional skills they are interested in. Moreover, if this is a back-fill position, try to find out why the employee resigned or was fired.

(b) How will this role impact the team and overall business? This lets you know the criticality of the open role.

(c) Where does a potential candidate fit in the company’s org. chart? That helps to know who they are going to report to and if they are going to have direct reports as well.

(d) What would make a potential candidate happy about working with the company? Ask the answer for WIFM: What’s In It for me? This is going to be a great selling pitch for you.

(e) What is this person expected to do on a day-to-day basis? If that is something that you cannot visualize, then ask your hiring manager to allow you to shadow a similar job to better understand how the business runs. This really helps you find the potential candidates who match the required profile.

(f) What are the deliverables expected out of a candidate in the first 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days? Will the candidate be given enough time to learn the business? This lets you know if the function is in good shape or if it’s in a critical situation that needs someone who can hit the floor from day one.

(g) What are the companies that you can target candidates from, and what are the companies that you cannot poach from (No-Solicitation Agreement)? This will save you a lot of time in targeting just the right companies.

1.2 Qualification related questions:

(a) What are the must-have and nice-to-have skills?

(b) What size of management is required for leads, managers, or C-suite levels?

(c) How much of total and relevant hands-on experience is required?

(d) Which industries should the candidates be targeted from?

(e) Is the position open to look for a candidate across the country or just locals?

1.3 Phone Screen questions: Get basic 3-5 technical screening questions with their possible answers from the hiring manager to disqualify the irrelevant candidates in the HR phone screen itself, and this spares interviewers’ time to some extent. These questions would be the relevant basic ones to gauge the must-have skills for a required role.

Strategy #2 Explore different Sourcing Strategies:

You don’t need the top-quality candidates for all the open positions. Many positions demand good candidates and some senior roles require top-notch quality, which are of high strategic importance. According to Prof. Amrin Trost, there are broadly four types of hiring that demand different sourcing approaches.

2.1. Simple Hiring: When you have high talent availability but less strategic relevance, then job posting works best as one of the sourcing tools.

2.2. Difficult Mass or Specialist Hiring: When you have low talent availability and less strategic relevance, then getting referrals from employees, approaching candidates via talent communities, or posting jobs are some of the supportive tools that works well.

2.3. Strategic Hiring: When you have low talent availability but high strategic relevance, in addition to the above techniques, the best way is to reach out beyond local candidates to thrive for excellence.

Strategy #3 Know your interview process thoroughly:

 You should not only get the details from your hiring manager about how many rounds of interviews there are, but also grab the names of interviewers who are on the interview panel. You need to have enough of them as backups to avoid any delays in conducting the interviews.

Also, the interviewers need to have expert knowledge on the subject matter for each candidate. At times, I have seen the hiring managers who ask novice interviewers to assess candidates and this may lead to wrong decision-making. Because of that, we often lose the good candidate to the competition or hire the bad candidate.

In all, the pointers above cover the one side of the kickoff meeting with the hiring managers, which is reaching out to the appropriate candidates.

Read my next article which is going to elaborate the other side: how to create confidence in the hiring managers for expediting the job closures.

Happy recruiting!