Your candidates, your workflows, your hiring technology – everything about recruiting continues to change except perhaps your hiring managers. They don’t live in the recruitment space and are experts at running their unit, not sourcing, screening, and interviewing. How can you bridge the growing gap between your hiring managers’ expectations and the realities of modern recruiting? Try these tips to strengthen your working relationships.
Tip #1: Be more relational, less transactional.
Recruiters are not just order-takers in today’s hiring. That’s an outdated perception, unfortunately still held by some hiring managers. Overcoming it starts with signaling to your hiring managers that you’re interested in a deeper relationship that will help you provide more value to their business unit. Do whatever it takes to understand better their management style, the culture within their division, and the traits, and interpersonal skills candidates will need to be a valuable addition to their team. When you receive reqs from a hiring manager, insist on a few minutes with them to ask questions and round out the information you need to develop a stronger shortlist. Approach every interaction with a hiring manager with a relationship-building mindset.
Tip #2: Use information and education to adjust hiring managers’ expectations.
As a recruiting professional, you understand the tight talent market, appropriate requirements for a role, and what’s possible with modern hiring technologies. Your hiring manager may not. Building a relationship and trust with your hiring manager will earn you the leeway to challenge unrealistic expectations. When a req comes through, talk with that manager about the state of the candidate pool for that position. Explain how your strategy will use data with an intelligent hiring platform to engage and identify best-fit candidates for their roles quickly.
Tip #3: Translate recruiting terms into what matters to your hiring manager.
This is a simple tip about communication. Your recruiting language with your team members may not mean much to a hiring manager. They may tune you out when you talk about interview-to-hire ratios, your virtual hiring platform, or even sourcing. Make a conscious effort to ask questions and explain what you’re doing to allow your hiring manager to understand the process clearly and partner with you to fill open positions. Talk about your hiring technology from their perspective – how using advanced selection science and modern candidate engagement tools translates into faster hiring and improved new hire performance and retention.
Tip #4: Use technology to make their participation convenient, easy, and productive.
When hiring managers come to you, they’re shorthanded and struggling to maintain productivity. You can quickly connect them directly with potential candidates using a science-based hiring platform that integrates assessment, video interview, and workflow automation tools.
An intelligent hiring platform like Modern Hire allows you to:
- Narrow candidate pools quickly for hiring managers using simple, engaging digital interview and assessment tools that predict fit
- Quickly build structured interviews with questions proven to lead to the best outcomes
- Share on-demand interviews with hiring managers virtually to help them more effectively evaluate candidates
- Use rating and review options to capture hiring manager feedback consistently and easily
- Send automated reminders to hiring managers to share their feedback
- Collaborate with hiring managers via video from any location on a mobile device for intake meetings, sharing a shortlist, discussing hiring decisions, and extending the offer
- Easily scale seamless, job-specific workflows for high-volume hiring
Tip #5: Coach on interviewing skills, unconscious bias, and compliance.
Many hiring managers, especially those who hire infrequently, have never benefited from interviewer training. Share your knowledge and skills in this area by inviting them to a coaching session on interviewing. You can cover the basics of interviewing, tips you’ve learned from your experience, information on compliance, and a big-picture view of the hiring process. You can also educate them on unconscious bias and how you use data, AI, and predictive analytics to reduce it in hiring. Their takeaway should be confidence in their ability to conduct more productive interviews and provide a better experience for candidates. Read more about reducing bias in interviews.
Tip #6: Work towards forecasting hiring needs.
You could be in a much stronger position to engage and hire better talent with highly proactive recruiting strategies. In some organizations, recruiters come to their hiring managers with forecasts for future talent needs and projections for time to fill those positions. They’re tracking turnover rates for positions over a period of years, researching how competitors attract candidates, and evaluating sources for quality hires.
Tip #7: Don’t give up on change.
Some hiring managers may be faster in embracing the changes you’re putting forward than others. Be persistent in a respectful way as they adjust. These tips will help you provide higher value to your hiring managers and secure the best talent for your organization.
Like to learn more about taking strategic recruiting next level? Download this Modern Hire resource.