Help Your Recruiters Help You

When asked, most recruiters will tell you that the most important people in their professional network are their hiring managers. As studies have shown, the two biggest factors in attracting and retaining talent are base pay and manager quality.

The title of “hiring manager” transcends the the professional definition of the role, which typically only applies to companies that are big enough to require professional managers. But every company, big and small, has someone that serves as hiring manager, at least some of the time.

Yet relationships between recruiters and hiring managers are often not as synergistic as they ideally should be. There might be a lack of clarity on a position, bandwidth limitations, unrealistic expectations, or simply disconnects on procedures, roles, and responsibilities.

Here is a list of 7 best-practices for a streamlined recruiting process (Re-posted from the article - The Role of the Hiring Manager in Recruiting).

1. Planning. Our urgency to implement (recruit) often translates into a lack of planning. This can lead to poorer outcomes in recruiting. Proper consideration needs be given for organizational design, leadership, team alignments, competencies, etc.
2. Three-way meeting. A meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter, and HR partner is critical for determining the optimal profile and recruiting strategy, and provide perspectives for recruiters on career paths, selling points, experience, or history of the hiring manager.
3. Help your recruiter learn what “good” looks like. The recruiter’s role is to minimize the amount of time that it takes a hiring manager to recruit, source, and screen high-quality talent. In order to do this, the hiring manager needs to make an upfront investment to ensure that the recruiter understands what “great” looks like. Aside from the meeting mentioned above, this includes some simple but important steps, such as talking about the profiles of some of the best people in their department or, if possible, meeting with some of those top performers on their team. In addition, get detailed feedback on why a manager liked or didn’t like a specific candidate. The more this is done, the better the recruiter should be able to deliver the right talent to the hiring manager.
4. Avoid the Common Pitfalls. I could discuss a lot in this section, but let me give you the Big Three:
   • Changes to what’s originally laid out for the job. A lot of the heavy lifting in recruiting is done during the first two to four weeks of the recruiting cycle. It’s when recruiters work hardest to source and screen talent. Any changes a hiring manager makes after the three-way meeting described above creates a lot of wasted effort for recruiting.
   • The industry-experience trap. Industry experience is not only highly overrated, but it’s also the quickest way to sub-optimize the talent you recruit. If you think of the pool of top-quality, top-quartile talent, the minute you say they must come out of the food industry or the high-tech industry, you’ve reduced that pool of available talent by about 98%! The fact is that for the majority of our jobs, top talent with high learning agility can learn the nuances of our industry, but industry-experienced candidates who do not possess high learning agility will never become top talent or future leaders for you.
   • The most important metric isn’t time-to-fill. When you ask most hiring managers about recruiting metrics, the first one they mention is time-to-fill. To me, it’s the least important metric and one that you want to score average on - whatever that metric is for your industry, function, or job. Hold your recruiters to the highest standards for quality and diversity. A year from now, you really won’t remember whether it took seven or 10 weeks to fill that job, but you’ll live with the quality of the hire for a long time.
5. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. By now, it’s clear that recruiting really is collaboration among the hiring manager, HR partner, and recruiter. To ensure that the partnership is effective, communication needs to be ongoing and in-depth. At a minimum, a weekly update meeting should take place beginning within two to three weeks from the project initiation.
6. Removing Roadblocks
   • Time is the enemy. For recruiters, this is a given. The best talents have many options in the marketplace, and they’re not going to wait for lengthy interview cycles or cumbersome decision-making processes.
   • Make sure interview teams are all reading from the same page, and determine who makes the hiring decision. Using multiple interviewers can increase the quality of the hiring decision. But, it’s critical to ensure that all interviewers are all in agreement as to what the hiring profile is, and that they send a consistent message to the candidate on the position, company, and culture. Also, if you have seven interviewers, get all of their input - but don’t set the expectations that all seven have to endorse the hire.
7. Selling the opportunity. Remember that the best candidates are also interviewing us. They’re assessing how we measure up to their expectations in relation to the job, the vision and the caliber of our leadership, the quality of our hiring manager and of their peers, compensation, benefits, career path, and culture. As a result, everyone that participates in the interviewing process should devote some time to addressing these topics and sell the opportunity.

Effective staffing models are sustainable, measurable, scalable, and repeatable. It is crucial that everyone involved stands on a uniform recruiting platform from which consistent results can be achieved. As business partners to our hiring managers, we recruiters want and need to bring the besting fitting -most qualified candidates to the table time after time. For that to be possible, we need to always be on the same page as our hiring managers. The same recruiting process needs to be shared across the board so we can all measure, improve, and deliver extraordinary results.

Tags: Best Practices, Staffing