What to do when the req is vague

Every recruiter has taken this brief. The manager wants someone senior. Someone who can own it. Someone who has done this before. You write it down, you nod, and you both leave the room with different jobs in your heads.

Six weeks later you are on candidate number eleven and the feedback is still "not quite it".

The problem is not laziness

Managers usually know what they need. They just describe it in outcomes rather than attributes, because outcomes are how they think about their own week. Your job is translation, not interrogation.

The fastest translation tool I know is a single question asked three ways.

Ask what the first six months look like

Not the job description. The calendar. What is this person doing in week two, and what has visibly changed by month six?

Answers to this question are concrete in a way that competency lists never are. "By month six the onboarding flow is rebuilt and the support ticket volume is down" tells you more than four bullet points about stakeholder management.

Ask who they would clone

Every manager has someone in mind, usually a former colleague. Ask who, then ask what that person did that made them good.

You will get specifics you would never have extracted from a form. You will also sometimes discover that the mental model is a person from a company ten times your size, which is a conversation worth having early rather than after four rejected finalists.

Ask what they would trade away

This is the one that saves the search. Give the manager a forced choice: deep domain knowledge or strong general ability. Someone who has done it at scale or someone who has built it from nothing. Fast start or long runway.

Managers hate this question and it is exactly why it works. A brief without a trade off is a wish list, and wish lists produce endless pipelines with no offers.

Write it down and send it back

Two paragraphs, not a document. What the person will do, what matters most, what you are willing to give up. Send it to the manager and ask them to correct it rather than approve it. People correct more honestly than they approve.

Then hold them to it. When feedback on candidate seven contradicts the brief, you have something to point at. That is worth more than any intake form template.

The version that fails

Long intake meetings that produce a competency matrix nobody reads. If your process takes ninety minutes and generates a document with fourteen sections, the manager will not remember any of it, and neither will the interview panel.

Twenty minutes, three questions, two paragraphs. Do it again if the search stalls, because a stalled search usually means the brief was wrong, not that the market is empty.