Talent partnerships
Write an agency brief that supports accurate outreach
An agency brief should explain why the role exists, the outcomes it owns, essential evidence, workable adjacent backgrounds, approved terms, and what candidates should understand early. Add the interview and decision process, communication expectations, and named client owner. A job description alone rarely gives a partner enough context to search or represent the opportunity well.
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Explain the work and its setting
Describe the business problem, first-year outcomes, team interfaces, manager, and constraints. Include what changed to create the opening and what the new person can decide. Agencies need enough context to distinguish a strong match from a familiar title. Remove internal shorthand and resolve conflicting expectations before the brief reaches candidates.
Translate requirements into evidence
For each must-have, say what credible evidence could look like and which backgrounds may offer transferable experience. Separate essential capability from preferred industry, employer, or qualification signals. Name the gaps the team can support. This gives the partner permission to search intelligently while protecting requirements that genuinely matter on day one.
Provide an honest candidate proposition
Explain why the work is meaningful, what is difficult, how success will be supported, and what remains uncertain. Confirm approved location, work pattern, level, compensation process, and likely timing through internal owners. Do not ask an agency to make the role sound larger or more certain than it is. Accurate outreach creates better self-selection and fewer late surprises.
- Purpose and four priority outcomes
- Must-have evidence and acceptable adjacencies
- Real challenge and available support
- Approved practical terms
- Interview plan and decision owners
Give the partner decision access
Name one person who answers questions, resolves conflicting feedback, and approves changes. Set times for candidate submissions, manager responses, and weekly recalibration. If several agencies or an internal team are involved, state how duplicate outreach is prevented. The partner should know how to flag market evidence without silently rewriting the brief.
Test the brief through a profile
Illustrative example: an agency reads cloud experience as experience at a large software company. During calibration, it presents a hypothetical infrastructure lead from a smaller business who managed comparable reliability decisions. The manager confirms the evidence is relevant and removes employer-size language from the brief. The first outreach can now describe the actual problem instead of filtering by company pedigree. Ask the partner to restate the role in its own words and draft the first candidate explanation. Misunderstandings often appear there even when the written brief seems accepted. Correct them before launch and save the approved explanation, so every consultant describes the same scope, uncertainty, and process. Add a change log to the brief so researchers can see which requirement moved, who approved it, and which active candidates need an update.
Next step
Ask the hiring manager and agency to calibrate one hypothetical adjacent profile against the brief, then revise any requirement that cannot be tied to observable work. Confirm the revised interpretation with the delivery researchers before outreach.