7 Ways Hiring Managers and Recruiters Can Work Better Together
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question on jobs data you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers isn’t always so amicable. Let’s fix that: What are your top tips to help recruiters and hiring managers work better together?
1. Make Hiring a Priority
Getting the most out of hiring processes is all about creating an effective partnership. Recruiters can source great candidates, but if managers don’t make the time to review resumes and interview candidates, then you risk losing top talent. It all comes down to making hiring a priority – not just for HR, but for everyone across the organization. People mistakenly think that HR alone owns the hiring process. But in order to hire the right people quickly, the entire leadership team within an organization needs to take ownership of the hiring process, too.
Hiring managers and recruiters should take the same approach with each other that they do with sourcing talent: Discuss in detail each other’s needs in relation to their services. Hiring managers should make sure that the recruiter is not only comfortable with, but competent at providing the type of talent they need. Recruiters should makes sure that hiring managers are clear in their objectives. Beyond this, it’s a good way to get to know the other quickly and comprehensively.
Recruiters need to earn trust in order to build strong relationships with their hiring managers. The recruiter can earn that trust by learning about the hiring manager’s needs in great depth, communicating with them about the status of potential candidates, and keeping the relationship friendly but very professional.
Call in a good mood. Happiness is literally contagious. So pick up the phone when you are feeling good, in order to spread some happiness and solidify the relationship at the same time.
Set and share expectations for how you will communicate with each other. Don’t be afraid to share negative feedback about candidates with each other, and be prompt with your communication. Dragging the process out with delayed communication just hinders the relationship.
Also, don’t communicate bad news by email. If you want to grow the relationship, pick up the phone.
One easy way to begin building trust is through face-to-face meetings, rather than conducting business solely over the phone. Hiring managers should feel at ease with a recruiter, which will make way for honest communication, which in turn enables the recruiter to be successful in finding an ideal candidate.
If a recruiter wants to build better business relationships with hiring managers, they would do well to adopt a curious mindset. Curiosity plays a fundamental role in our learning, but so many recruiters fail to be curious. They fail to dig deep and uncover hidden problems with their clients.
Recruiters need to ask more probing “how” and “why” questions: Why is the role open? How will it impact your business if the role isn’t filled? How does your company bring new products to the market?
The deeper the curiosity, the more information a recruiter will gather. This will increase the recruiter’s credibility with the hiring manager, and it will help them better sell career opportunities to candidates. It’s a winning situation for everyone involved in the hiring process!
