What the Intake Call With a New Institutional Client Should Actually Accomplish
The intake call is the first substantive conversation between a search consultant and a new institutional client. It typically happens after the engagement has been agreed and before the active sourcing work begins. In theory, this is the conversation where the search consultant learns what the client needs and the client learns how the search will work. In practice, most intake calls accomplish only a portion of what they should, and the gaps show up later: searches that produce strong candidates on paper but miss the specific operational context the client is navigating, role profiles that do not reflect what the hiring manager actually needs, and search timelines that slip because the expectations established at kickoff did not account for how the client’s internal process actually works.
Matt Lesher, search consultant at Real8 Group, works on VP of Facilities, Director of Construction, Director of Engineering, Project Executive, and Superintendent searches for universities, health systems, cultural institutions, and owners’ rep firms. In this post, he explains what a well-run intake call should accomplish, what most intake calls miss, and why the quality of that first conversation has a disproportionate effect on the quality of the search that follows.
What Most Intake Calls Get Right
Most intake calls cover the basics adequately: the job title, the reporting structure, the compensation range, the geographic scope of the search, and a high-level description of the role’s responsibilities. This is necessary information and good intake calls collect it clearly. But collecting the basics is the floor, not the ceiling, of what an intake call should accomplish. The institutions that run the strongest searches are the ones where the consultant leaves the intake call with a much more specific picture of the search context than any job description could provide, and where the hiring manager leaves the call with a clearer articulation of what they are actually looking for than they had before the conversation began.
What Most Intake Calls Miss
The Operational Context Behind the Opening
Every senior facilities or construction leadership search exists in an operational context that shapes what the right hire looks like in ways that never appear in the job description. The institution may be at a particular moment in a capital program: a major bond referendum just passed, a new academic building is under construction with a delivery date that the organization cannot miss, or a deferred maintenance backlog has reached a threshold that is attracting board attention. The incumbent may be departing under circumstances that have left the team in a specific state: high morale and capable execution, or disrupted and uncertain about the direction the organization is heading. A new president, provost, or CFO may have arrived with expectations about the facilities function that differ significantly from how the function has historically operated. These contextual factors change what the right candidate profile looks like, what questions the evaluation process needs to answer, and what the onboarding challenge will be. A consultant who does not know them cannot search for the right person. An intake call that does not surface them is a missed opportunity that the search will pay for later.
What Success Looks Like at 18 Months
One of the most valuable questions a search consultant can ask in an intake call is: if the person we hire into this role is performing well eighteen months from now, what will that look like in concrete terms? Most hiring managers have not been asked this question before the intake call, and the process of answering it is generative. It forces the hiring manager to articulate outcomes rather than activities, to distinguish between what the job description says the role will do and what the organization actually needs the role to accomplish in this specific moment, and to identify the one or two things that, if they are not happening, will signal that the hire is not working. Those outcomes become the anchors for the evaluation criteria, the reference check questions, and the offer conversation. Intake calls that do not get to this question produce searches where the evaluation framework is built on activity descriptions rather than performance expectations, and the misalignment surfaces after the hire has been in the role for a year.
The Institutional Navigation Dimension
For institutional clients, the intake call needs to surface the political and relational landscape the new hire will be entering. Who are the key stakeholders the VP of Facilities or Director of Construction will need to build relationships with in the first six months? Where are the existing tensions between the facilities function and other institutional functions, finance, academic affairs, clinical operations, development? What is the institution’s decision-making culture: does the new hire need to build consensus before acting, or is the expectation that they will move quickly and inform stakeholders after the fact? How much authority does the role actually have over capital program decisions versus how much authority the job description implies? These questions are not comfortable to ask in a first conversation with a new client, but a search consultant who does not ask them will send candidates into an institutional environment they are not prepared to navigate, and the hire that looks strong at offer will struggle in the role for reasons that the search process never identified.
The Internal Process the Search Has to Work Around
Every institutional client has an internal process for approvals, offers, and decisions that the search timeline has to account for. Some institutions have HR-driven offer processes that require two to three weeks of internal routing before an offer can be extended. Some have board or trustee approval requirements for VP-level appointments. Some have compensation bands that are managed by HR and require a waiver process if the finalist’s expectations exceed the approved range. A search consultant who does not know these process constraints at the start of the engagement will build a search timeline that assumes a decision-to-offer interval that is not achievable, and the search will stall at exactly the moment when speed matters most: when the finalist has been identified and is fielding other conversations. The intake call is the right moment to map the internal process, understand where the friction points are, and build a realistic timeline that accounts for them.
What a Well-Run Intake Call Produces
A well-run intake call produces four things that a standard kickoff does not. First, a search consultant who understands the operational context well enough to explain it to a candidate in a way that makes the opportunity compelling and the challenges honest. Second, an evaluation framework anchored in specific outcomes rather than generic competencies. Third, a candidate profile that reflects not just what the job description says but what the institutional moment requires. Fourth, a realistic search timeline that accounts for the client’s internal process rather than assuming an idealized one.
The intake call is also the first opportunity for the client to assess whether the consultant they have engaged actually understands their institution and their sector. A consultant who asks the right questions in the intake call signals that they have the domain fluency to represent the search credibly to passive candidates. A consultant who collects the basics and moves on signals something different. The intake call is not just how the search starts. It is how the client-consultant relationship starts, and the quality of that relationship is one of the most reliable predictors of the quality of the search that follows.
Matt Lesher works on VP of Facilities, Director of Construction, Director of Engineering, and Project Executive searches for institutional clients at Real8 Group. If you are preparing to launch a senior facilities or construction search and want to understand how we approach the intake process, visit real8group.com/how-we-work, meet the team at real8group.com/team, or reach out directly at real8group.com/contact.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.