Before you can hire the right person, you need a process designed to attract, screen, and select intentionally. That’s what the Hiring Strategy Meeting is for.
We’ll finish with a clear playbook for each stage of the hiring journey.
Who should come to this meeting?
- The position’s boss (absolutely mandatory)
- Key stakeholders
- Those with important insight and input
How long will it take?
Hiring Strategy meetings can be as short as 20 minutes for established clients and as long as 2 hours across two parts for onboarding clients. Each company is different. We don’t rush these meetings because they improve the search speed and effectiveness.
What we will ask of you: Detail
- Show up with honesty, transparency, and thoughtfulness. Details make the difference in search and hiring.
- Answer the questions as comprehensively as you can. This role and your company are quite unique, even compared to companies who build the exact same structures.
Attraction Strategy: Defining Why Someone Should Join You
Great hiring starts long before the first interview. It begins with clarity about why the right person would want to join your team.
Our first goal in the Hiring Strategy Meeting is to define your attraction strategy, how we’ll position this opportunity in the market.
Questions to reflect on:
- What’s the real business problem this hire will solve?
- Why is this role exciting, meaningful, or strategic to your company’s future?
- What does success look like in 6, 12, and 24 months?
- What kind of leader will they report to, and how would that person describe their management style?
- How does this role contribute to your mission, culture, and reputation in the industry?
When you can articulate the story of the opportunity, you shift from posting a job to inviting impact.
The outcome of this phase is a hiring brief that sells the opportunity authentically while setting clear expectations for performance and culture. It becomes the blueprint for how we talk about your role to the market.
Screening Strategy: Knowing What to Look For
Once attraction is defined, we turn to the screening strategy, how we identify, qualify, and prioritize potential candidates.
This phase is about reducing noise and focusing only on the people who have a true shot at success.
Questions to reflect on:
- What credentials or experience are non-negotiable?
- What project types or company environments best mirror yours?
- What past hires have succeeded or failed in this seat, and why?
- What specific behaviors, skills, or patterns signal long-term fit?
- How should we handle trade-offs between experience, leadership maturity, and cultural alignment?
We’ll also define your must-haves versus nice-to-haves so the search doesn’t drift.
The goal isn’t to cast a wide net. It’s to build a strong filter. We’ll design the early evaluation stages so you see only those candidates who are truly aligned with your needs and context.
The outcome of this phase is a screening profile, a document that guides our sourcing language, candidate outreach, and early assessments so everyone evaluating knows what “qualified” really means.
Interview Strategy: Turning Insight Into Confidence
The third and most critical component of the meeting is the interview strategy. This is where we define how your team will assess alignment, capability, and compatibility.
Without structure, interviews quickly become opinion polls. With a plan, they become data-driven conversations that reveal how someone will perform within your team.
Questions to reflect on:
- What should each interviewer be accountable for assessing?
- What interview formats best suit this role (technical deep dive, cultural conversation, leadership assessment, etc.)?
- How will we measure alignment and avoid bias?
- What soft skills or interpersonal dynamics are crucial for this team to thrive?
- What specific questions or scenarios would reveal those traits?
We’ll also clarify how feedback will be gathered and synthesized. Each interviewer will receive a prep packet with tailored behavioral questions, and a reflection form will be used after each interview to capture impressions while they’re fresh.
Finally, we’ll define what fit really means in your organization: the values, attitudes, and communication patterns that lead to long-term success under your leadership.
The outcome of this phase is a custom interview plan, a structured roadmap that keeps every interviewer aligned, every candidate experience consistent, and every decision confident.
What Happens After the Meeting
When the Hiring Strategy Meeting is complete, we’ll translate everything into a unified system that includes:
- A compelling hiring brief for market attraction
- A precise screening profile to guide evaluation
- A structured interview plan that drives clear, confident decisions
You’ll leave with a documented process that can be reused and refined over time, one that saves time, reduces risk, and strengthens team collaboration.
Let’s Make This Count
When you approach the Hiring Strategy Meeting with preparation and openness, you elevate how your company hires.
