The role kick-off meeting is meant to set up the search for success and save time during the interviewing process. Generally, this meeting is the first step in the structured hiring process and is roughly an hour long.
Meeting attendees include the Recruiter on the role and the Hiring Manager but can also include anyone else assigned to the Hiring Team for the role, such as a Coordinator and/or Sourcer.
In the meeting, the Hiring Team will explore three key areas, as well as define what short-term and long-term success looks like in the role.
Defining the job's business objective
Before we define an ideal candidate by the business objectives of the job we need to qualify what we mean by objectives and why we distinguish them from tasks. Simply put, the distinction between the two is that objectives focus on long-term and big-picture results, while tasks tend to emphasize the daily activities of a new hire.
By focusing on the intended outcomes of a successful hire you can distinguish between a superstar hire and an average performer. This reorients the conversation from short-term needs to long-term goals. While the structure and format of your role kick-off meeting is entirely up to your team, we've taken the liberty to provide some questions to help you get started thinking about the business objectives of the job:
- What goals need to be achieved a year from now for you to determine that the hire is successful?
- What will a superstar hire accomplish in a year?
- For a superstar to accomplish that, what do they need to do in the first 90 days?
These objectives will provide your team with a roadmap to build out other elements of your structured hiring plan.
Identifying candidate skills, traits and qualifications
Once the role and objectives are defined, use that list to map out the skills, traits, and qualifications a candidate will need to have in order to be successful. We think of skills as well-defined abilities, e.g. knowledge of a particular type of software or coding language, while traits describe someone’s personality, e.g. action-oriented or team player. Qualifications and experience are attributes like degrees, certificates, or particular career milestones.
Feel free to use the table below as a possible template when mapping skills, traits, and qualifications:
| Role | Objective | Attributes |
| Manage a team of sales people | Support sales team to outperform sales goals | Proven success managing team of multiple sales people |
| Sets sales strategy for the region | Optimize sales strategy and conversion rates (QoQ) | Demonstrated ability to improve sales pipeline efficiency |
| Optimizes sales process | Diagnose process bottlenecks, create action plan |
In the case of more complicated or unusual jobs, we recommend that your Hiring Team reconvene at the beginning of the Sourcing process to review a few profiles together. This will help ensure that everyone on the Hiring Team is aligned about what potential candidates look like.
Dividing hiring team roles and responsibilities
Division of responsibilities makes the hiring process more efficient. Use the kick-off meeting to allocate the various responsibilities of the hiring process to members of the Hiring Team. Generally, a Recruiter guides the overall hiring process and creates the structure for success, while the Hiring Manager works as the subject matter expert (SME) for the role. As an SME, the Hiring Manager will be tasked with providing feedback and creating the technical and/or job-specific pieces of the interview.
Below is the typical division of labor between a Recruiter and a Hiring Manager. Feel free to use or amend the table to suit your Hiring Team.
| Recruiter | Hiring Manager |
| Builds scorecard | Provides feedback on all drafts and candidate profiles |
| Designs interview process | Writes technical pieces of interview: e.g. take-home exercise, code review, finance-specific behavioral questions |
| Drafts interview questions | |
| Drafts outreach list |
Additional resources
For more information about the role kick-off meeting, download the guides attached to this article. Based on your screen size, this may appear at the bottom or on the top right side of the page.