Delivering the placement · Lesson 16 of 18 · 7 min
Most failed searches fail before any sourcing happens, in a fifteen-minute conversation that established nothing. This lesson is about that conversation, and about the two weeks at the end where fees are actually lost.
When a search goes wrong, the visible symptom is usually a rejected shortlist. The cause is almost always earlier: nobody established what the manager would actually say yes to, so the search ran against a document written for an approval process.
Six questions. Ask them before you look at a single profile, and expect some of the answers to contradict the job description — that contradiction is the value.
What are the two things that genuinely cannot be missing?
Not the job description. Managers will list ten requirements and hire someone with six, so the useful question is which ones are real. This single question does more to prevent a wasted search than anything else you can ask.
Who did this job before, and what happened to them?
Tells you whether it is a replacement, a growth role or a role people leave. It also surfaces the unspoken specification — the manager is usually looking for the last person, improved, or the opposite of them.
What does the process look like, and who else decides?
Number of stages, who is in each, how fast they can move. A hidden second decision-maker discovered at stage three is how good candidates get lost, and slow processes lose people to faster employers.
What is the actual range, and what is the ceiling?
The advertised range and the real ceiling are frequently different numbers. You cannot present accurately or close an offer without knowing the second one, and asking directly at intake is entirely normal.
What would make you say no to a strong CV?
The disqualifiers, which are rarely written down. Sector background, gaps, notice period, location expectations. Knowing them stops you submitting someone who was never going to pass.
How urgent is this, honestly?
A role somebody has to fill by month end and a role somebody would like to fill eventually deserve very different amounts of your time. Asking directly is more reliable than inferring it.
The mirror of intake. You need to know as much about what would make them say no as about whether they can do the job:
A short summary in your own words
Three or four sentences: who they are, why they fit this specific requirement, and what to look at. This is the part the manager actually reads, and it is where you demonstrate that you screened rather than forwarded.
The CV, unaltered in substance
Formatted for readability if you like, never edited to change meaning. Anonymising contact details is normal practice; rewriting history is not, and it is discovered at interview.
The answers to their disqualifiers
Notice period, location and travel, compensation expectation, right to work, anything sector-specific. Pre-empting these removes the questions that otherwise bounce back and cost two days.
One honest reservation
Every candidate has a gap against the spec. Naming it yourself is counter-intuitive and it is the single fastest way to be trusted, because a recruiter who says nothing negative is understood to be selling.
Their availability, and yours
Concrete windows for interview. The most common cause of a slow first stage is scheduling by email, back and forth, over four days.
Check yourself
A manager rejects your first three submissions as "not quite right" without much detail. What most likely went wrong?
Why should you include a reservation about a candidate in your submission?
Between submission and offer, your job is mostly speed and information. Prepare the candidate for who they are meeting and what that person cares about. Debrief both sides within a day of every stage — not to be attentive, but because a reservation caught on day one is fixable and the same reservation caught on day five has become a decision.
And keep the client moving. Good candidates are in more than one process, and the most common way a new agency loses a placement it had won is a client who took two weeks to schedule a second interview.
An accepted offer is not a start date. Screening still has to clear, and when you are the employer of record that obligation is yours rather than the client’s — including the compliance sequence that has to be followed if a report comes back badly. That is the next lesson.
Key takeaways
The conversation with the hiring manager before you start searching, where you establish what they will actually say yes to — which two requirements are genuine, who held the role before, what the real compensation ceiling is, what disqualifies a strong CV, and how the process runs. It is the highest-leverage half hour in a search, because a search run against the job description instead of the real requirement fails weeks later for reasons nobody can articulate.
A short summary in your own words explaining why this person fits this specific requirement, the CV itself with substance unaltered, answers to the client’s known disqualifiers — notice period, location, compensation expectation, right to work — one honest reservation about the gap against the spec, and concrete interview availability. The summary and the reservation are what distinguish a submission from a forwarded CV.
Three causes account for most of it. A counter-offer the candidate had not thought about in advance. An offer that was never really aligned, because nobody knew the candidate’s actual number and the client’s actual ceiling before it was made. And the notice period, during which weeks pass and people reconsider. All three are preventable by conversations held earlier than feels necessary.
Before it happens, not after. Ask the candidate early what they will do if their employer improves the deal, and let them think it through while nothing is at stake — the reasons they wanted to leave are much clearer to them then. Once a counter-offer is on the table the conversation is emotional and you are the interested party, which is the worst position from which to be persuasive.
Few, and each with a reason. Sending a large number signals that you have not screened and shifts the work back onto the manager, which is the thing they hired an agency to avoid. Two or three genuinely considered submissions with clear reasoning is a stronger position than eight, and it also makes your rejections informative — when a shortlist that tight is turned down, you learn something about the specification.
Finished this lesson?
Next: Background checks and pre-employment screening
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