How to actually run it. What to say. How to find real pain.

In Part One, we made the case for the importance of discovery. Why skipping it costs you. Why symptoms are not root causes. Why the deeper you diagnose, the easier everything downstream becomes.

Part Two is where it gets practical.

This edition breaks down how to actually run a discovery meeting from the moment you open the call to the moment you agree the next step. You will get a structure to follow, the questions to ask at each stage, and a clear framework for uncovering real pain rather than surface frustration.

This is the part most recruiters never get shown. Let’s fix that. 👇🏼

The quality of a discovery meeting is largely determined before it starts.

Most recruiters do one of two things. They either research everything they can find and walk in with a head full of facts they never use, or they do nothing and go in blind. Neither is right.

What you actually need to know before the meeting is simple.

You want to understand the context of the meeting. Did this come from a cold approach, a referral, or an inbound enquiry? That changes how you open. 

A client who reached out to you is in a different headspace to one you cold-called three weeks ago. Approach both the same way and you immediately lose ground.

You also want to have a few specific, relevant observations ready. Not a script, but a few things that signal you have done your homework. A recent hire into a leadership role. A funding announcement. Something they posted that shows you understand their world. Two or three of these go a long way.

The goal is not to impress them with research. The goal is to make them feel that you already understand enough to have a proper conversation. That sets a different tone from the first 60 seconds.

Discovery is not a free-flowing chat. It has a structure. Not a script, but a clear sequence that allows you to move through the conversation with purpose.

The four stages are build, explore, diagnose, and qualify. Each one has a specific objective. Each one builds directly into the next.

Section 1: Build Rapport and Credibility

Focus: Connect as a human first. Show curiosity and awareness. 

Trigger: Create trust fast and earn permission to go deeper.

The first two minutes of a discovery call are not a warm-up. They are the call.

Most recruiters treat the opening as dead time. A bit of small talk, a vague "so, shall we get started?", and straight into questions. The prospect is still mentally somewhere else and you have already lost control of the room.

The recruiters who consistently win at discovery do two things before a single question gets asked: they confirm the time, and they set the agenda.

Here is the finessed version, with your actual talk tracks dropped in and the surrounding copy tightened to match the tone:

Confirm the time first.

"I have us down for 45 minutes. Does that still work, or have you got a hard stop earlier?"

One sentence. It signals you respect their calendar. And it tells you exactly what you are working with before you are already rushing.

Then set the agenda.

Walk them through the structure before a single question gets asked. Why you are here, how you plan to spend the time, what you want to agree at the end. If you skip this, you will hit friction the moment you start asking questions. They do not know why you are asking. You have not told them.

"Plan of action for the first part of this call is to get a proper understanding of how you typically approach attracting and recruiting brilliant talent into the business, then have an honest conversation about what you believe is working well and what could be improved."

Set the upfront contract.

Name the decision you want to make together before you start asking anything.

"By the end of the call I should have a clear idea on how we might be able to help, how we have helped similar organisations in your position, or not. Sound fair?"

You are not asking if they want to move forward at the end. You are collecting on an agreement you made at the start. That is a completely different dynamic.

Then ask this before you dive in:

"Is there anything specific you are hoping to walk away from this call with? What would make this a genuinely good use of your time?”

That question does more work than it looks like. It tells you what they actually care about. It gives them some ownership of the conversation. And it gives you a target to hit at the end, before the call has even properly started.

That is rapport with intent. Not asking about their weekend. Showing up prepared, naming the structure, and handing them a small piece of control before you take the rest of it.

When you do this well, the prospect is leaning in before you have asked a single discovery question. That is the permission to go deeper. That is the trigger.

Section 2: Explore Current Approach

Focus: Understand how they hire today and who's involved. 

Trigger: Surface process gaps and inefficiencies that need solving.

You have set the agenda. You have earned the permission. Now the real work starts.

This stage is the most underused in recruitment. Most recruiters jump straight from the brief to the search. But the brief is not the full picture. It is a surface-level summary of what someone thinks they need. How they actually hire tells you everything else.

You are not here to fill a role yet. You are here to understand their world.

Questions that open this up:

"Walk me through what happens when you decide to hire. What is the first step?"

"Who typically gets involved once a role is signed off?"

"How do you usually find or attract candidates?"

"What is working well with your current approach?"

"If we looked at your last few hires, what did that process look like from start to finish?"

These are not qualifying questions. They are diagnostic ones. You are not checking boxes. You are mapping how this company thinks about talent.

What you are actually listening for:

The answers matter. The gaps matter more.

If they cannot clearly explain their own hiring process, that tells you something. If they have never benchmarked their offer against the market, that tells you something. If the decision maker they name now is different to the person they mentioned earlier, that definitely tells you something.

This stage is about surfacing how they think hiring works versus how it actually works. That gap is where the opportunity lives.

Here is the finessed version, using the slide questions as the backbone and cutting the copy back to match the tone of the other sections:

Section 3: Finding and Deeping Pain

Focus: Move beyond surface frustrations. 

Trigger: Quantify the cost of doing nothing, time, money, or delivery risk.

This is where most recruiters stop early.

They hear a problem, they feel like they understand it, and they move to solutions. But what they have usually heard is a symptom, not a cause. And if you solve a symptom, you have not really solved anything.

A client tells you they keep losing candidates at offer stage. That feels like a clear problem. 

But the cause could be a salary that is below market, a three-week interview process that loses people to faster-moving competitors, or a final panel that interviews inconsistently. If you accept the surface answer and move on, you are solving the wrong thing.

The goal of this stage is to move from what they do to what it is costing them.

Questions that get you there:

"Which parts of that process tend to slow things down or frustrate you?"

"When a hire does not work out, what is usually the reason?"

"How often do your first-choice candidates actually make it through?"

"What impact does that have, lost time, team stress, missed delivery?"

"If you were to fix one thing in that process, where would you start?"

Stay curious longer than feels comfortable. Do not accept the first answer. If they name a frustration, go one level deeper. How long has it been present? What have they already tried? What happened?

The more clearly they can articulate what is wrong, the better placed you are to position a solution that actually addresses it.

You are not selling yet. You are helping them feel the cost of staying the same.

Here is the finessed version using the slide questions and cutting the Zac Thompson reference (not our IP):

Section 4: Diagnose and Qualify

Focus: Assess the size and urgency of the problem. 

Trigger: Confirm whether this is a problem you can solve and if they are ready to fix it.

Understanding a problem is not the same as someone being motivated to solve it.

This is where many deals quietly fail. The discovery is good. The pain is real. But the person you are speaking to does not have the urgency or the authority to do anything about it. Weeks later you are chasing feedback on CVs that nobody ever had any intention of reviewing properly.

Qualification is not about interrogating someone. It is about testing commitment honestly before you invest a significant amount of your time.

Questions that tell you what you need to know:

"If you could fix just one part of your hiring process, what would it be?"

"How big a priority is this right now: nice-to-have or must-fix?"

"Who else in the business feels this pain most?"

"If we built something that solved this properly, what would success look like?"

"When would you ideally want this person in seat?"

Three things are worth being clear on before you leave this stage:

Urgency. If nothing changes, what actually happens? If the answer is vague, there is no real pressure. If the answer is "we miss our growth targets and I am personally accountable for that", that is a different conversation entirely.

Authority. Are you speaking to the person who signs off on hiring decisions? If not, who is? Everything you do downstream is conditional on someone you have never met agreeing with it.

Commitment. Would they give feedback on a shortlist within 24 hours? Would interviews happen within a reasonable timeframe? Is budget signed off? These are not unreasonable questions. They are the ones most recruiters are afraid to ask.

End the conversation with clarity: is there real pain, urgency, and ownership? If yes, you have earned the right to move into Stage 5 and position the solution.

Here is the full closing section brought together:

A discovery call without a clear next step is not a discovery call. It is just a conversation.

Most recruiters end calls the same way. "I will get that over to you and we can find a time to catch up." It feels polite. It feels natural. And it almost always leads nowhere.

Before you get off the call, you need three things confirmed: what they are going to do with what they have shared, what they expect from you next, and specifically when you will speak again.

BAMFAM. Book a meeting from a meeting.

It is the simplest principle in sales and the most ignored. Every call ends with a next call in the diary. Not a loose "let's find a time." A specific date. A specific time. Agreed before you hang up.

You set the upfront contract at the start of the call. You are collecting on it now.

"Based on everything we have covered, the most logical next step is X. I would rather get something in the diary now than risk it slipping. Would the back end of next week work?"

You are not asking if they want to move forward. You are prescribing the next step and asking if the time works. That is a completely different dynamic.

If they will not commit, that is important information. Either the motivation is not as strong as the conversation suggested, or there is someone else involved in the decision you have not met yet. Either way, you need to know that now, not after three weeks of search work.

A pipeline full of "I'll be in touch" is not a pipeline. It is a wish list.

Book the meeting from the meeting. Every time.

The debrief is where the value compounds.

Within thirty minutes, write down three things.

What they said the problem was. Then ask yourself: was that a symptom or a root cause? If it was a symptom, what question would have taken you one level deeper? Note it. Use it next time.

The exact words they used to describe the problem. Not your paraphrase. Their language. When you follow up and when you pitch, speaking their words back to them is one of the most powerful things you can do. It signals you were listening. It makes the solution feel like it was built for them, because in a real sense it was.

Whether you covered all four stages. Most calls drift. Rapport runs long, the explore section feels productive, and then the call is nearly over and you have not properly diagnosed anything. The only way to catch the pattern is to review it honestly after the fact.

One better question per call, applied consistently, compounds quickly. Within a month you will notice the difference.

Here is where the real separation happens.

Most discovery conversations operate at the level of what. What role, what skills, what salary, what timeline. That information is necessary but it is not sufficient. It does not tell you anything about why.

The questions that get you to why tend to fall into three categories.

For those of you who use meet note takers this is where this part will be so much easier to do but still an often overlooked opportunity to improve your next client meeting.

Every recruiter asks questions on a discovery call. The best recruiters ask questions that make the prospect stop and think. That is the difference.

Great discovery is not about covering more ground. It is about going deeper in the right places. The recruiters who have genuinely honed this skill over hundreds of calls tend to do one thing consistently: they organise their questions across three time horizons. The past, the present, and the future.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Questions about the past

These are some of the most revealing questions you can ask. Most clients have patterns, and those patterns become visible the moment you ask about what happened before.

"When you last hired for a role like this, how did it go?"

"If you could change one thing about how you have run this process historically, what would it be?"

"What made previous hires succeed or fail in this type of role?"

If a client has been burned by a recruiter before, or by a bad hire, it will surface here. And surfacing it is good. It means you can address it directly rather than having it sit in the background influencing every interaction without ever being named.

Questions about the present

These explore what is actually happening right now and how serious it is.

"What is the current impact of this role being unfilled?"

"Who in your team is absorbing the extra work, and how long can that continue?"

"How is this landing on you personally?"

That last question is the most important one in this section. People make decisions with emotion, justified by logic. 

If the only consequences you have explored are business-level and abstract, the motivation to act stays distant. When you connect the problem to someone's personal experience of it, the cost of staying the same becomes real. That is when urgency stops being a concept and starts being a feeling.

Questions about the future

These help someone articulate what success would actually look like. In doing so, they begin building the solution themselves.

"If we fast-forward twelve months and this search has gone exactly as you hoped, what does that look like?"

"How would you know that working together had been genuinely valuable, rather than just adequate?"

"If there were no recruitment agencies at all, how would you approach solving this problem?"

That third question is a disruptive one. It removes the easy answer and forces someone to think about the problem independently of the solution they came to the call expecting. What surfaces is almost always more revealing than anything in the brief.

You do not need all of these questions on every call. You need the right ones at the right moment. The past, present, future structure gives you a map. Where you go deepest depends on where the real pain lives.

Slow down to speed up.

Most recruiters treat discovery as the part of the call you get through before the real work starts. The brief, the pitch, the terms. That is the work. Discovery is just the warm-up.

That is exactly the wrong way to think about it.

When you invest properly in discovery, everything downstream gets easier. Clients are more committed because they helped shape the solution. Candidates are better matched because you understood the problem properly. Conversations about terms happen between two people who already trust each other. The whole experience, for everyone involved, is better.

You are not slowing down to be thorough. You are slowing down because it is the fastest way to get to the right outcome for your client.

The recruiters who consistently win better work are not necessarily the ones with the best pitch. They are the ones who have diagnosed well enough that by the time they present a solution, it feels obvious. The client has practically built it themselves. There is nothing to sell. There is only something to confirm.

That shift, from someone trying to win a job to someone trying to solve a problem, is what moves you from transactional recruiter to genuine consultant. 

Clients feel the difference immediately. They brief you differently. They respond differently. They refer you differently.

It does not happen because of your pitch. It happens because of the questions you asked and how patiently you listened.

Get this right and you will bill more, work with better clients, and enjoy the job more. 

That is not a coincidence. It is the compounding return on a skill most recruiters never bother to develop properly.

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

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