4 Strategies for Seamless Recruiter-Hiring Manager Communication

February 10, 2014 at 7:12 AM by Kathleen de Lara

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As the old proverb goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

These days, while it may not take a village to find a candidate, there are times when it definitely feels that way. The hiring process isn’t always easy or smooth, but reinforcing your organization from the ground up is the key to building a robust recruiting team — starting with recruiters and hiring managers.

The two groups are notorious for butting heads, yet despite their differences, recruiters and hiring managers share a single, common bond: to quickly hire qualified candidates.

It may sound simple, but even a small hitch in hiring can cost your company dollars down the road. The consequences of recruiter-hiring manager miscommunication aren’t pretty. For one thing, setbacks like high turnover rates and an increased time to hire can hurt the long-term success of current employees. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a turnover of 4.3 million employees were accounted for between November 2012 and 2013. Yikes.

Before your organization can make the hires it needs to be great, it’s crucial to have great recruiters and hiring managers. Check out these four fundamentals to amping up your game plan.

Know what you want to get want you want.

Anyone can write and hand off a job description to a recruiter, but that doesn’t make it an effective means of finding the right candidate for the role. An initial briefing between recruiters and hiring managers offers the perfect opportunity to set context and expectations for a new hire. Details on the role’s key priorities and success metrics, current department challenges, and growth opportunities take the list of basic responsibilities and qualifications to the next level. Be clear on what you’re looking for, and conversely, what you aren’t looking for.

Also, consider getting feedback from a current, high-value employee on what qualities make for an ideal team member to add valuable insight to your search. Leverage your current network to help you reach your goals of successfully expanding.

Schedule frequent check-ins.

Plan to meet anywhere between one and three times a week to discuss recruiters’ success in finding potential hires. Given that hiring managers are often busy with their own tasks, even setting aside 30 minutes for a phone call will allow ample time to go over recruiters’ progress, standout candidate profiles, and solutions to any obstacles that may have surfaced.

Keep in mind that while having more résumés may come across as victorious, it’s about quality, not quantity. Narrow your choices to a select number of suitable contenders with a happy medium of skillsets and experience to keep to a time-efficient, thriving process. Digging a candidate’s CV? Make it clear to recruiters to keep an eye out for all-stars just like that one, which helps them understand what you’re looking for.

Get in line! (With branding company culture and rewards, that is.)

One of the biggest flubs made by recruiters and hiring managers is forgetting to properly promote how the candidate can benefit from an opportunity. Think beyond a competitive salary, and your sourcers have nailed it. In order to attract talent, candidates need to feel their professional and personal goals will be cultivated throughout their time with your organization. Bonus points for giving them a reason to be proud of their workplace.

Find out if your recruiters and hiring managers are on the same page when it comes to communicating the company’s awesome perks and developments. Did the team just launch a new product last week? Direct them to the article that was written up on it. Promoted someone on the engineering team recently? Talk about where he started and how he reached his current position. You got how many vacation days this year?! Debate about whether or not this tan is a good look. Maybe.

No matter the bonuses your company boasts, be sure both your recruiters and hiring managers are synced up on what to sell and how to sell them so that candidates can get riled up about joining your team and not someone else’s.

Follow up each hiring cycle with metrics and data.

As you probably already know, placing a candidate in a position doesn’t mark the end of the hiring cycle. Give recruiters a quick evaluation of their work to gauge productivity and efficiency. To start, contrast the number of rejected candidates to the number of “runner-up” candidates. If the first number exceeds the latter, there’s a high chance your recruiter’s strategy is creating a time sink for your company, and we all know what time equals.

Meet with your recruiters and hiring managers to review the hiring process, from the time of job posting through the candidate’s start of employment, to find out what worked and what didn’t work. Streamline the approach for more cost-effective, smarter recruiting tactics next time around.

By nurturing the relationship between your recruiters and hiring managers, the hunt for top talent becomes less hectic and more productive, making for happy candidates and a satisfied team.

Want to find out how Entelo can help your team get a competitive edge over other recruiters? Schedule a personalized demo with one of our industry pros to get started.

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