Writing a brief that finds the right people

The brief is the plain-language description of who you're looking for. Emoti turns it into the criteria every match is checked against, so a sharp brief gives you a sharp shortlist. Write it on Home in What should we work on?, or under Describe in Sourcing. Each role page also shows the Working brief the agent sources and screens against.

Ask these questions first

Get the answers from the hiring manager before you write a word. A recorded intake with the Hiring manager intake template captures most of them; see Running a client intake call.

• What will this person own in their first year?
• What can't they do without on day one, and what can they learn on the job?
• What have strong people in this role done before? Is there someone you'd hire again tomorrow?
• Where do they usually come from, and where shouldn't we look?
• What are the location, the workplace setup and the pay range?
• What does the interview process look like, and who decides?

Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves

Every criterion is either a must have or nice to have. Must-haves count double, and missing one caps someone's score at 54, so they can't rank as a strong fit however well they match the rest. That makes each must-have expensive: it pushes down everyone who doesn't meet it.

• Keep must-haves to the few things the job can't be done without. If everything is a must-have, nothing is.
• Make anything that can be learned in the first months nice to have.
• Skills usually start as nice to have. If one is truly essential, open its chip and turn on Must have.
• A stated minimum such as "5+ years" usually becomes a must-have. Keep it only if the years themselves matter.

Evidence beats proxies

Proxies are stand-ins for what you actually want: years of experience, school names, well-known employers, job titles. They're easy to write and they screen out good people, such as someone with a career break or a less usual path.

• Write the outcome, not the stand-in: "has shipped forecasting models to production" rather than "8+ years in machine learning".
• Name the problems they'll face: "data-heavy interfaces for people who use them all day" says more than "senior designer".
• When you review matches, hover the fit strip to read the evidence for each criterion and judge on what the person has done. See Reading the fit strip.

A brief that works reads like this: "Senior data engineer in Berlin who has run Kafka streaming pipelines in production, with Spark and dbt, ideally from logistics or e-commerce." It names the role, the place, the evidence and the skills that matter, and where to look. Nothing else.

Calibrate on the first batch

Results arrive in batches of ten. Treat the first batch as a test of the brief, not the answer.

1. 1.Open a few profiles and read How they match: the evidence for each criterion.
2. 2.Shortlist the people you'd be glad to call and Pass on the rest. Decisions build your shortlist; they don't change how the next batch is ranked, so if most results miss for the same reason, change the brief.
3. 3.Check Who meets each criterion. If very few people meet a must-have, Emoti suggests making it nice to have to widen the search.
4. 4.If the matches are off in a way the criteria can't fix, choose Edit brief, describe what you've learned and choose Rebuild criteria. Your shortlist decisions are kept.
5. 5.Show the hiring manager the first few shortlisted people before outreach starts. A quick yes, no and why now saves weeks of reaching out to the wrong people.

Then choose Show the next to see another batch. When the hiring manager changes their mind later, or the first interviews teach you something, use Edit brief again rather than working around the old criteria in your head. For more on reviewing, see Reviewing matches: shortlist, pass and profiles.