The 20-Minute Call That Decides Whether You Ever Meet the Hiring Manager

If a recruiter asks you to jump on a quick call about a job, it’s very easy to treat it as the bit before the real interview.

It’s only 20 or 30 minutes. The recruiter is usually pretty friendly. They might tell you a bit about the company, ask what you’re looking for and run through a few things on your CV. It feels more like a conversation than an interview.

But there’s something important happening during that call.

The recruiter is deciding whether they’re prepared to put you in front of the hiring manager.

And if the answer is no, you’ll probably never get the chance to show the person actually doing the hiring how good you are.

I’ve worked in recruitment for more than 20 years, and I’ve had thousands of these conversations. Sometimes I already knew within the first ten minutes that I wanted the hiring manager to meet someone. Other times, somebody looked absolutely perfect on paper and the conversation introduced enough doubt that I decided not to progress them.

So while I wouldn’t suggest treating a recruiter screening call like a formal interview, I definitely wouldn’t treat it like an informal chat either.

Because it’s doing a very specific job.

Usually, something on your CV has already worked.

The recruiter has looked at your experience and seen enough of a potential match to justify spending some time speaking to you.

That’s good news.

But a CV can only tell them so much.

Maybe you’ve listed a particular skill they need, but it isn’t clear how much experience you actually have with it. Perhaps your most recent job looks relevant, but the job title is slightly unusual. Maybe you’ve moved around a lot and they want to understand why. Or perhaps everything looks great, but they need to know whether you’d actually consider the salary they have available.

There are gaps between “this person looks potentially suitable” and “I think the hiring manager should meet this person.”

The screening call exists to close those gaps.

That’s why thinking of it as a miniature version of the hiring-manager interview isn’t quite right either. The recruiter generally isn’t trying to assess absolutely everything about you in 20 minutes.

They’re trying to establish whether there’s enough reason to move you forwards and whether there’s anything that should stop them.

This is the bit candidates don’t always see.

If I send a hiring manager five CVs and all five people are obviously unsuitable, that reflects on me.

If I tell them someone looks brilliant and they spend an hour interviewing that person only to discover they don’t have the experience I said they had, that reflects on me too.

A recruiter’s job isn’t simply to find people who have the right keywords on their CV. Part of the job is filtering.

So when I put you in front of a hiring manager, I’m effectively saying:

“I’ve spoken to this person. I understand what you’re looking for. I think they’re worth your time.”

Your job on that initial call is to make me comfortable saying that.

You don’t need to give me the greatest interview performance I’ve ever witnessed. You don’t need a beautifully rehearsed STAR answer for everything. And you certainly don’t need to spend the entire conversation trying desperately to impress me.

I just need enough evidence to believe there’s a sensible match.

It varies by job, obviously, but there are a handful of things happening in most screening conversations.

A CV is marketing. That doesn’t mean it should be dishonest, but it does mean it presents the strongest version of your experience.

The recruiter now needs to understand what’s behind it.

If your CV says you led a transformation programme, what did you actually lead? If you managed stakeholders, who were they? If you increased revenue by 30%, what was your contribution to that?

This doesn’t necessarily mean the recruiter thinks you’re lying. They’re adding context to something that can only be explained in a couple of lines on a CV.

One of the easiest ways to make this harder than it needs to be is giving incredibly vague answers.

If I ask what you’re responsible for and you spend three minutes describing what your company does, I still don’t know what you do.

Be able to explain your role, your level of responsibility and the things you’ve actually delivered without making me excavate the information from you.

Recruiters ask this all the time, and candidates sometimes assume there must be some sort of trick involved.

Usually there isn’t.

I’m trying to understand the move.

If you’ve been somewhere for six months and want to leave, I’ll probably want to understand why. If you’ve been there for ten years, I might want to know what has changed now. If you’re looking for progression, I need to understand what progression means to you so I can work out whether this job actually provides it.

You don’t need to invent some perfectly sanitised answer about being excited by new challenges.

You just need to make the move make sense.

There’s a difference between saying, “My manager is an absolute dickhead and I need to get out,” and pretending you’ve dreamt your entire life about working for a company you discovered existed yesterday.

There’s usually a perfectly reasonable answer somewhere between the two.

Again, I’m not expecting a love letter to the company.

But if you applied, I’d expect you to have some idea what you applied for.

This becomes particularly important when somebody has applied to 100 jobs and clearly can’t remember which one I’m calling about.

You don’t need to know the CEO’s favourite breakfast or recite the company’s values back to me. But you should understand what the job is and be able to explain why it broadly makes sense as your next move.

Some of the least exciting questions in a screening call are also some of the most important.

• Salary.

• Notice period.

• Location.

• Hybrid expectations.

• Working hours.

• Right to work.

• Travel.

• Start date.

None of these tell me whether you’re brilliant at your job, but any one of them can stop a recruitment process.

If the maximum salary is £60,000 and you won’t move for less than £75,000, it’s better for everybody to know that now than after three interviews.

The same applies if the job requires three days a week in Manchester and you live four hours away with absolutely no intention of relocating.

That isn’t rejection because you’re not good enough. The job simply doesn’t work.

Recruiters spend a lot of time thinking one step ahead.

I’m not only listening to what you’re telling me. I’m thinking about what the hiring manager is going to ask when I show them your CV.

Why did they leave that job after eight months?

They haven’t worked in this industry before. How transferable is their experience?

This role looks like a step backwards. Why do they want it?

They haven’t managed a team this size before. Can they make that jump?

They’ve been contracting for five years. Why do they want a permanent role now?

None of those things automatically rules you out.

But if I know they’re going to become questions, I want to understand the answers before I put you forward.

And sometimes a really good explanation turns what looked like a concern on the CV into absolutely nothing.

Good recruiters tend to be pretty good at talking to people.

That shouldn’t be particularly surprising.

We generally don’t want a screening call to feel like you’re being questioned under caution. I want you relaxed enough to talk openly about what you’ve done, what you’re looking for and what matters to you.

So I might joke with you. We might go off on a tangent for a minute. I might tell you things about the company or hiring manager that aren’t in the job description.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped assessing whether I should progress you.

This is something worth remembering throughout recruitment processes generally. An interview doesn’t have to feel like an interview for somebody to be forming an opinion.

The opposite is also true.

If the recruiter sounds quite structured, has a list of questions and doesn’t spend much time chatting, don’t assume you’re doing badly. They might simply have 15 screening calls to complete and a set of information they need from every candidate.

Don’t spend too much energy trying to read the recruiter.

Spend it making sure you’re giving them useful information.

You don’t need to prepare for it in the same way you would a full competency interview.

But please don’t answer the phone having forgotten what job you applied for.

Before the call, I’d make sure you can clearly explain five things.

First, what you actually do. Not your job title. Not what your team does. Not the history of the company. What are you responsible for and what have you delivered?

Second, why you’re looking to move. You don’t need a rehearsed speech, but you should be able to explain why you’re having this conversation.

Third, why this particular opportunity broadly makes sense. Read the job description again. Know what you’re speaking to them about.

Fourth, the strongest evidence that you can do what they need. If the role revolves around something you’ve already done successfully, don’t make the recruiter drag that information out of you.

And finally, anything on your CV that might create a question. Short tenures, gaps, career changes, unusual job titles, apparent steps backwards or anything else that might need context.

You should also know your practical position on salary, notice period, location and working arrangements.

That’s probably enough.

You don’t need 50 prepared answers.

This is probably the simplest advice I can give you.

If you’re suitable for the job, make that suitability easy to understand.

Recruiters are usually speaking to several candidates. Hiring managers are usually busy. Nobody gets extra points because somebody had to ask six follow-up questions before finally discovering the relevant bit of experience buried somewhere in your career.

And this is where good candidates sometimes make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves.

They assume their CV speaks for itself.

They assume the recruiter knows what their job title means.

They assume the relevance of an example is obvious.

They assume somebody will ask the exact question that gives them an opportunity to mention their strongest achievement.

Don’t assume.

If something is important to understanding why you’re right for the job, make sure it comes out.

At the beginning of that 20-minute conversation, the recruiter is essentially asking:

“Should I put this person in front of the hiring manager?”

If you’ve done enough for the answer to be yes, the next stage becomes different.

Now you’re likely to be speaking to somebody much closer to the actual hiring decision.

They’ll want more evidence. They’ll go deeper into your experience. They’ll compare what you’ve done with what they need. They’ll start thinking about what it would actually be like to hire you.

And that’s where proper interview preparation matters.

I’ve spent more than 20 years sitting on that side of the table too, and I’ve put what I’ve learnt into The Job Interview Playbook - how hiring managers actually make decisions, how to predict what they’re likely to explore and how to prepare the evidence they’ll need to hear.

But before you worry about the hiring manager, remember what that “quick chat with the recruiter” actually is.

It’s the conversation that decides whether you ever get to meet them.

• Download my free CV Template

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• Prepare properly with The Job Interview Playbook

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