Very early in my career as a technology recruiter, I realized that no matter how good of a job I did in the production of qualified candidates for any specific requirement, I was only going to be as successful as my least capable hiring manager partner.

I realized the greatest, most powerful tool I had at my disposal was the knowledge, network, and communications integrity of the hiring managers I supported; the benefits of my having created a partnership with them as a function of our working relationship.

Hiring managers, usually know exactly what criteria will drive their hiring decisions, and what it is about the opportunity that will motivate candidates to take action. The challenge for recruiters is gaining a shared vision of the opportunity; to get to where they view the position through the eyes of their hiring managers.

I certainly wasn’t alone in that approach. In the 1990’s, if you were going to get ahead of the competition in the white-hot recruiting environment of the day, you had to use every tool in the box, including the value your hiring managers could bring to the execution of every step in the recruitment process.

Hiring managers as customers. Why and how did it happen?

Since the second quarter of 2001, the degree to which hiring managers are engaged with the recruitment process has declined to a focus on the definition of requirements, and the evaluation of candidates against those requirements.

The decline in hiring manager involvement in non-interviewing recruiting transactions over the following years was understandable, given the number of unemployed, but highly qualified candidates, across all industries, was so much higher than the number of available jobs.

Employers quickly realized they didn’t have to do much beyond posting an opening on the Careers page of their web site to generate a strong stream of qualified candidates, even for jobs that had previously been difficult to fill. Aside from a couple short lived positive blips in the job market, things stayed that way for almost 15 years.

Over time, recruiting organizations simply stopped expecting their hiring managers to do anything more than produce position requirements and then evaluate candidates against them. As a result, hiring managers who were once active partners with their recruiting teams, are now often viewed as customers by their staffing organizations.

As the balance between skilled labor and job opportunities has become tilted in favor of skilled labor, employers hoping to optimize their recruiting outcomes are faced with the challenge of re-engaging their hiring managers in every phase of the recruiting process; reclaiming the high value hiring managers bring to the identification, attraction, and closure of candidates in a demand-driven labor market.

Creating hiring manager partnerships

Staffing professionals looking to create partnerships with their hiring managers can take big steps forward by simply starting to treat them like partners, by involving them in decisions and activities that will improve their recruiting outcomes.

What follows here are descriptions of methods and techniques recruiters can use in 3 critical recruiting process steps to start and expand partnering relationships with their hiring managers.

Position Definition: Gaining a shared vision of the opportunity

Anyone can read a job posting, but the criteria that determines who is going to be hired into any mission-critical job is rarely included in the job posting. A job posting, alone, won’t typically motivate a candidate to pursue an opportunity with passion.

Hiring managers, however, usually know exactly what criteria will drive their hiring decisions, and what it is about the opportunity that will motivate candidates to take action. The challenge for recruiters is gaining a shared vision of the opportunity; to get to where they view the position through the eyes of their hiring managers.

Here are 4 simple questions any recruiter can use to accomplish a simple debrief with a hiring manager for a mission critical position:

Question #1

“What is the person you hire going to have to accomplish in their first 6-18 months on the job for you to feel they have been a great success?”

This question not only helps a recruiter qualify potential candidates, by allowing them to pose specific questions as to applicable experience and accomplishments, but is also critical in the framing of referral solicitation requests.

By focusing on the image of a successful candidate for a critical position, based on what they must accomplish, the recruiter can move past generic responsibility and requirement statements into the real criteria separating great candidates from good looking resumes.

Question #2

“What are the 2 most critical functional relationships for the hired candidate? Who are they going to have to develop successful partnerships with in order for them to be successful in the job?”

The answer to this question can have a significant impact on who is asked to be part of the interviewing team, and can also help identify internal, cross-functional referral solicitation opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

For example, if you’re seeking a Sales professional, and find that their relationships with Applications Engineers, Systems Engineers, and Demand Planning professionals will be critical to their success, then it may be worth the recruiter’s time to ask their organization’s top performing Applications Engineers, Systems Engineers, and Demand Planning professionals who, in their respective networks, they would recommend for the Sales role.

Question #3

“Assuming two candidates have similar educational and professional experience, what intangibles will cause you to choose one over another; what kind of person do you want to bring into this role?”

This question is important, in that it solicits information as to the behavioral and personality traits the hiring manager feels is important, if not critical, for the candidate to bring to the organization.

A follow-up question of “Why is that behavior or trait important?” will help recruiters better understand the relationship, operational, or emotional challenges associated with the job.

Question #4

“If you found someone who was a perfect match for a mission critical position on your team, what would you tell them about the job, your team, your business unit, or the company to motivate them to talk to you?”

This is the gold mine question for recruiters. Understanding why the hiring manager thinks the position is cool, unusual, and attractive enables the recruiter to align their pitch with that of the hiring manager.

When candidates hear consistent messaging from everyone they speak with at the beginning of the recruiting engagement, it helps them feel confident that everyone is on the same page, that there’s a high degree of connectivity between the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the team.

When your hiring manager doesn’t have answers for the questions…

The greatest benefit of asking these 4 simple questions may be finding out early in the process if the hiring manager doesn’t have good answers for them. If that’s the case, the recruiter has an opportunity to advance their partnership with the hiring manager by helping them figure out their answers before its candidates that are asking the questions.

Not only will the hiring manager be better prepared to evaluate candidates against their true selection criteria, and present selling information to motivate candidate interest, they will also gain an appreciation for the value the recruiter brings to their hiring efforts; the value of their partnership.

Defining an optimal interviewing team: Sometimes, less can be more.

Helping your hiring managers determine who should be invited to be a member of their interviewing team for specific positions represents another opportunity to create and enhance the recruiter’s partnership with their hiring managers, while adding to the quality of the recruiting process.

Every experienced recruiter understands the negative impact of having too many people, or the wrong people, involved in the evaluation of candidates. Too often, organizations design failure into their process by not looking to optimize the make-up of their interviewing teams.

While there is no one methodology defining the optimal interviewing team for all positions or organizations, there is a simple approach that can be used as a starting point in the identification of optimized interviewing teams.

Clearly, the hiring manager and that person’s immediate manager need to be part of the interviewing team. It also makes sense to include a peer from the team, so the candidate can get a feel for the situation on the ground from a potential co-worker.

To determine the rest of the interviewing team, let’s go back to Question #2 from earlier in this post:

“What are the 2 most critical functional relationships for the hired candidate? Who are they going to have to develop successful partnerships with in order for them to be successful in the job?”

Asking the two most critical functional partners for the position to be part of the interviewing process produces two highly positive outcomes.

The first is that the people who will be asked to partner with the hired candidate will provide a view of the candidates from outside the core team, from a different perspective. The second, however, is that the partners who have endorsed a candidate hired using this interviewing approach will have a vested interest in the candidate’s success.

They helped to select them, so they will be motivated to help make them a success.

By helping hiring managers identify a logical method for building an interviewing team (whether you use the one presented here, or an alternative method), the recruiter has further established his/her role as a consultative partner.

Partnering to achieve an accepted offer: Who’s doing what?

Once the decision has been made to extend an offer to a candidate, the benefits of creating a strong recruiter/hiring manager partnership really become apparent.

This is where recruiters can really prove their worth as partners to their hiring managers. Through the identification and elimination of personal barriers to closure, even when they’re uncovered late in the process, recruiters can demonstrate their commitment to the success of the partnership.

Typically, the acceptance of an employment offer represents the execution against a line of commitments between the candidate and the employer. Minus the recruiter/hiring manager partnership, there may be little to no coordination of the lines of commitment set between the recruiter and the candidate, and those set between the candidate and the hiring manager.

At this point in the process, the failure to successfully execute recruiting transactions carries a very high cost of process quality. The company has already invested in the complete sourcing, screening, and evaluation effort, creating a sunk cost that cannot be recovered if closure isn’t achieved.

In order to operate at a high performance level in this stage of the process, the recruiter and the hiring manager must have an established partnership in place. They must have the ability to formulate a plan to achieve closure together, and the faith in each other’s ability and desire to perform the parts of the process they have agreed to own.

There are three primary factors driving the candidate’s decision to accept or reject an employment offer.

The first has everything to do with the job; whether the opportunity meets or exceeds the candidate’s professional expectations and career objectives. This is a conversation best managed by the hiring manager, since the hiring manager has the authority to follow up on any commitments made to the candidate in pursuit of an acceptance.

The second has to do with the compensation package associated with the offer, and this is where the recruiter should take the lead, with guidance from both the hiring manager and the company’s rewards/compensation team. By taking money out of the conversation between the hiring manager and the candidate, you eliminate any potential misunderstandings between the principals in the deal that could lead to relationship or trust issues at a later date.

By sharing ideas as to how to prepare a candidate to accept an offer, and then coming to an agreement as to who is going to manage these conversations and resulting action items, the recruiter and hiring manager create a division of shared responsibility and authority; a partnership agreement.

The third factor driving candidate decisions involves the personal issues and challenges the candidate must overcome to facilitate the move to your company. Relocation, spousal employment, children in school, health issues, immigration, extended family issues; any number of personal issues that can kill a deal.

Ideally, the recruiter will have identified most of these potential barriers to closure before inviting the candidate in for the first interview, but candidates are not always completely open on all fronts, especially if the barrier to closure is deeply personal or potentially embarrassing to them.

This is where recruiters can really prove their worth as partners to their hiring managers. Through the identification and elimination of personal barriers to closure, even when they’re uncovered late in the process, recruiters can demonstrate their commitment to the success of the partnership.

When hiring managers see this level of commitment and competency, they’re motivated to respond in kind, furthering the sense of partnership on both sides.

Transitioning to blue sky partnerships

While this post only focused on three transactional opportunities for recruiters to create partnerships with their hiring managers, rest assured there are many more out there, most of them involving the development of hiring manager skills in other steps in the recruitment process.

Over time, these partnerships can transcend the recruitment process, enabling recruiters to play an active and important role in the identification of organizational development scenarios, as well as career and skills development opportunities enabling talent acquisition programs.

Investing the time and energy in the conversion of hiring managers from customers to partners is the first, and best step a recruiter can take in elevating the quality and outcomes of their personal performance.