This document discusses how to improve relationships between talent leaders/recruiters and hiring managers. It notes that strong relationships between these groups are critical for hiring success. However, many recruiters and hiring managers feel misunderstood by each other. The document outlines three touchpoints in the hiring process - job scope, candidate slate/interviewing, and offer/onboarding - and provides strategies recruiters can use at each stage to better meet hiring managers' needs and build trust. Measuring and continually improving the relationship is also emphasized.
3. “The most influential predictor of a talent
acquisition performance outcomes is a
strong relationship between the recruiter
and the hiring manager.”
- Bersin by Deloitte
3
4. 15%
23%
37%
25%
Applied HR Screening Hiring Manager Review Interviewing
4
THE ROADBLOCK
Percentage of time the
average resume spends in
each status of the hiring
process:
5. of recruiters
feel that hiring managers
do not understand recruiting.
57% 63%
of hiring managers
feel that recruiters
do not understand the jobs they are filling.
5
THE DISCONNECT
7. “54% of recruiters say that hiring managers
expect recruiters to place candidates into
hard-to-fill positions more quickly than
is feasible.”
- ICIMS
7
10. “77% of hiring managers say recruiters’
candidate screening is inadequate.”
- ICIMS
10
11. CANDIDATE SLATE &
INTERVIEWING
EXPERIENCE GOAL:
Qualified, engaged candidates are presented
in the established timeline. Interviews are
structured to focus on cultural fit.
13. “Up to 20% of turnover happens within the
first 45 days.”
- Aberdeen Group
13
14. OFFER & ONBOARDING
EXPERIENCE GOAL:
Assurance that all candidate requirements are
met – no surprises! Excited and prepared to
welcome their new employee.
15. 15
CANDIDATE SLATE & INTERVIEWING
TOTAL COMPENSATION
GAME PLAN
OFFER LETTER TEMPLATE ONBOARDING BEST PRACTICE
STACEY
Welcome and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar. “Turn Your Hiring Manager from Roadblock to Raving Fan”
We will start by getting a few logistic items out of the way and then straight into our content.
First, we do live-Tweet all of our webinar events, and invite you share your questions or comments using the hashtag talentmindset, also be sure to follow us at @cielotalent to get industry news and our latest thought leadership updates.
If you have a question for Anne or Kathleen, we will leave time at the end, so please use the onscreen tool to submit those at any point during the presentation.
And, finally, the question we receive most often: yes, this presentation is being recorded and will be available via email with the presentation deck tomorrow.
ERIN – QUICK INTRODUCTION OF BRAND
Cielo is the world’s leading strategic Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partner. We leverage our global reach, local talent acquisition expertise and customized solutions to help clients achieve a sustained advantage and outstanding business outcomes through their talent practices. Cielo’s global presence includes more than 2,000 employees, serving 177 clients across 95 countries in 39 languages.
ANNE
Recruiting is about relationships.
Bersin by Deloitte conducted a study on the top 15 performance drivers in a successful TA program. One of the most interesting things they found was that the relationship between hiring managers and recruiters is the top driver of talent acquisition performance and four times more influential than all the other 15 performance drivers measured. Let’s say that again, because it’s important – the relationship between talent acquisition and hiring mangers is the NUMBER ONE predictor of talent acquisition performance. Not the latest HR Technology, it wasn’t a shiny new EVP or the strongest and most embedded employer brand, it wasn’t even a top notch candidate focused experience with a mobile optimized career site. It was Your internal relationships between hiring managers and your TA team
This is not to say that those other things aren’t critically important in a top performing TA function, they are. But in today’s world of 100’s of new and emerging TA technologies and all the swirl around automation and artificial intelligence changing the face of recruiting. It’s easy for TA leaders to lose sight of the some of the basics of good recruiting: people relationships. After all…recruiting is a people business.
Bersin also found that the majority of TA leaders (so your peers) agree that their recruiters who have the closest relationships with hiring managers outperform recruiters who are not as connected. Here at Cielo we believe the critical balance to get right is the perfect combination of high-tech for the sake of high-touch. And this is true for both your hiring manager AND your candidate experience.
We can all remember a time when a key hire was missed because a hiring leader held up the hiring process for one reason or another. Maybe you lost the perfect candidate to a competitor because it took too long to get an interview on the hiring manger’s calendar. Or a candidate dropped out of the process because the job role and responsibilities wasn’t different in the eyes of the hiring manager compared to the job description.
It can be easy to point fingers, but the truth is, it’s time for us to take ownership of the hiring manager relationship and work to build an experience that increases communication and alignment so hiring managers are satisfied, recruiters can be successful, and engaged candidates become happy hires. It’s a WIN WIN WIN!
ANNE
Let’s a look at this from another viewpoint. According to icims, The average resume, once submitted to an organization, spends 37% of the whole hiring process sitting with the hiring manager for review...which usually means sitting in the hiring managers in box… And in this time a candidate can drop-out, accept another offer. It could mean they still come out in the end as a hire for your hiring manager, but that’s a significant amount of time to sir waiting for feedback and can have a negative impact on their interest in working for your company and a significant amount of time for a HM’s job to go with no one in it. All three of these outcomes are things we want to avoid. So we need to focus on reducing the dead time in the process that creates a roadblock to filling good jobs with great people. To do that, we have to understand what is really behind this roadblock, why is the process getting stuck with the hiring manager?
Jodi to add story or POV
ANNE
There is a communication breakdown and a serious disconnect between recruiting and hiring managers. Read the stats. So that means that every time a job gets filled, more than half the people of both sides don’t think the other party knows what they are doing! Well that explains a lot…
These stats are both a bit funny and eye-opening. Recruiters think that Hiring Managers don’t get how to get good talent in their teams. And Hiring Managers think that recruiters aren’t even looking for the right talent to begin with.
There is a lack of communication and frankly trust between the two parties – each assuming the other is missing the big picture. This distrust causes the process to slow down as each party questions or double-checks the other.
So how do we fix it???
Jodi with story on educating HM who doesn’t hire often
ANNE
The key to building trust and improving the relationship is by crafting a hiring manager experience, not just a process but an experience.
We are going to do this by focusing on the hiring process itself and each stage the hiring manager is involved with.
We have broken the hiring process it into 3 parts. For each piece of the process we will walk through our top 3 recommendations on how to tweak or improve the process to create a great experience and boost hiring manager alignment and satisfaction.
These examples come from our experience in working with TA leaders like you, to allow you to relate to many of the challenges that our clients face day to day.
ANNE
Let’s look at the first piece. Here’s a data point to set the scene.
ANNE
KB: A Job Scope should be a knowledge share between the Recruiter and Hiring Manager to discuss the position and align expectations including timeline and communications, candidate availability, market conditions and hiring strategy.
AB: Your hiring manager knows that participating in the job scope will result in both parties understanding the role to be filled and the talent that exists to fill it, what to expect during the recruiting process, and trusts that the recruiter will do what they said they would.
ANNE
Self-schedule: Took the idea from our candidate experience…..disconnect about when the req is approved when the job scope happens, when the recruiter starts working on it.
BPO firm hiring managers unable to schedule a job scope for regularly recurring hires can utilize an automated voice technology allowing them to update the recruiter on this need and provide any changes to the profile/location/shift etc anytime 24/7 for the recruiter to pick up and use to move forward with filling the jobs. Eliminates the back and forth and time delay if they are not able to speak during business hours
Market Intelligence: There should be one main question that is top of mind for hiring managers “What market dynamics are influencing our hiring for this role?”. Use all of the data that is available to you to share a lay of the talent landscape right up front during the job scope call. Often times hiring managers can have unrealistic expectations for what the talent market will bare . Before you say “yup, right on it!” when some asks for the biomedical engineer that speaks Farsi and lives in Tulsa, knowing that you are going to have to go back later to adjust the scope, have the tough conversation outright. Help them understand what the talent availability looks like and be ready with recommendations on how they can tweak the job description or geo location to expand their search and lower the time to fill. There are lots of tools at your finger tips. Your HRIS can show success profiles from past candidates/current employees; your ATS can show pipeline reports; Glassdoor will show salary, reviews, and competitor insights. Use what you have to come prepared with data to back your recommendations!
Process Guide FAQ: There will always be new hiring managers inside your organization. Help them be successful in their role AND position yourself as a consultative resource by creating an FAQ document that answers common hiring process questions. You can cover everything from how a job scope call is scheduled after a requisition is approved, to the company's average time-to-fill for the most common positions. This document will help set expectations and clarify roles and responsibilities – getting new Hiring Mangers up to speed faster and in-turn speeding up time-to-fill.
A global chemical analysis and diagnostics company eliminated frustration for new and old HM but clearly laying out the process via a similar document. Not only is the document sent at the start of the job scope, but it’s resent throughout the process to remind the HM of what’s happening now and next so they are prepared.
JODI ADDS STORY AND BEST PRACTICE AROUND EFFECTIVE JOB SCOPES. SET EXPECTATIONS.
ANNE
Bersin by Deloitte conducted a study on the top 15 performance drivers in a successful TA program. One of the most interesting things they found was that the relationship between hiring managers and recruiters is the top driver of talent acquisition performance and four times more influential than all the other 15 performance drivers measured. Let’s say that again, because it’s important – the relationship between talent acquisition and hiring mangers is the NUMBER ONE predictor of talent acquisition performance. Not the latest HR Technology, it wasn’t a shiny new EVP or the strongest and most embedded employer brand, it wasn’t even a top notch candidate focused experience with a mobile optimized career site. It was Your internal relationships between hiring managers and your TA team
This is not to say that those other things aren’t critically important in a top performing TA function, they are. But in today’s world of 100’s of new and emerging TA technologies and all the swirl around automation and artificial intelligence changing the face of recruiting. It’s easy for TA leaders to lose sight of the some of the basics of good recruiting: people relationships. After all…recruiting is a people business.
Bersin also found that the majority of TA leaders (so your peers) agree that their recruiters who have the closest relationships with hiring managers outperform recruiters who are not as connected. Here at Cielo we believe the critical balance to get right is the perfect combination of high-tech for the sake of high-touch. And this is true for both your hiring manager AND your candidate experience.
We can all remember a time when a key hire was missed because a hiring leader held up the hiring process for one reason or another. Maybe you lost the perfect candidate to a competitor because it took too long to get an interview on the hiring manger’s calendar. Or a candidate dropped out of the process because the job role and responsibilities wasn’t different in the eyes of the hiring manager compared to the job description.
It can be easy to point fingers, but the truth is, it’s time for us to take ownership of the hiring manager relationship and work to build an experience that increases communication and alignment so hiring managers are satisfied, recruiters can be successful, and engaged candidates become happy hires. It’s a WIN WIN WIN!
ANNE
KB/AB: Hiring manager feels that candidates provided are well qualified and presented within established timeline; candidates are knowledgeable and prepared for the interview. During interview, the hiring manager is present, feels prepared and is able to focus on the candidate’s skills, experience and cultural fit with organization.
ANNE
Streamline Interview: A lot of work goes into getting candidates onsite and finding the available time on the hiring managers calendar. Make the most of available time and try and coordinate finalist interviews on the same day. Also, if you have multiple leaders including the hiring manger interviewing – plan ahead and split up key interview questions so their isn’t overlap. Leaders will default to high-level questions which will have the candidate responding to the same question over and over again. It’s not a great candidate experience, and it won’t help the hiring manager uncover more insight on the candidate.
We have also found that interviews are most successful when hiring managers are responsible for judging culture fit. They know the team, and they know the role. It’s the recruiters job to take care of screening for technical skills BEFORE the candidate comes in for an person with the hiring manager.
A Silicon Valley start-up tried this strategy with great success. Hiring Managers were pleased to know that the skills were screened and verified allowing them to have more meaningful conversations with the candidate. Culture fit is a huge deal for this org. so the change was well received. It also made candidates happy as they were able to get to the know the leader and the role better vs. when they have to walk through their resume and technical skills one by one. (Renovate America)
A semiconductor company established a process to streamline the interviews by calculating the time from the date the position opened to when interviews are typically held for the role, based on historical data; allowing the hiring manager to pre- block time for the interviews.
Fast Feedback loop: Don’t wait until after the hiring manager has turned down the top three candidates. Don't be afraid to ask a hiring manager if what they're looking for has changed, which happens all the time. This is especially important with junior hiring managers, who may not actually know what they're looking for in the first place. The more open the lines are for feedback – the more likely you can avoid re-work or worse starting over. We know that scheduling de-brief calls can be tough and survey participation is challenging as well– consider other channels of communication that are more convenient for the hiring manager. Rather than a survey link in an email, send a text with a mobile optimized survey link for quick post-interview feedback. OR after an interview ping the Hiring Manager via text or email with the link to scheduled on to your calendar IF they need to connect about reassessing the job requirements.
You can also try scheduling feedback as part of the interview process. At the same time that you book a hiring manger for a phone interview or in person interview, book time for a feedback session as well.
A healthcare call center provider: simple capture form that is automatically sent to HM at the close of the interview to provide immediate feedback while fresh in their mind and initiate the pre – hire work for those that are identified for hire. Also shortens the process to find additional candidates if the candidate is a no. Consider incorporate and easy thumbs up/thumbs down for managers.
Candidate Cliff’s Notes:
It's not uncommon to work with hiring managers who are booked back-to-back with travel, conference calls, presentations and during this time of year – vacation! In today's hiring climate, your process must be efficient. Help your hiring managers expedite the process by giving them “cliff notes” of the top candidate slate, rather than passing along full resumes and audio files of interviews, which would be cumbersome for a Hiring Manager to review and digest. This quick one-pager can outline the top candidates’ relevant previous work experience and motivation in seeking or applying for the job. This will help hiring managers quickly review their options and expedite the follow-up interview scheduling.
One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies created a Cliff’s Notes template for hiring managers and the feedback was outstanding. Not only did they appreciate the consistent format but having the same outline used again and again, allowed them to quickly compare different candidate slates to see how the talent market was changing over time. (BMS)
ANNE
Bersin by Deloitte conducted a study on the top 15 performance drivers in a successful TA program. One of the most interesting things they found was that the relationship between hiring managers and recruiters is the top driver of talent acquisition performance and four times more influential than all the other 15 performance drivers measured. Let’s say that again, because it’s important – the relationship between talent acquisition and hiring mangers is the NUMBER ONE predictor of talent acquisition performance. Not the latest HR Technology, it wasn’t a shiny new EVP or the strongest and most embedded employer brand, it wasn’t even a top notch candidate focused experience with a mobile optimized career site. It was Your internal relationships between hiring managers and your TA team
This is not to say that those other things aren’t critically important in a top performing TA function, they are. But in today’s world of 100’s of new and emerging TA technologies and all the swirl around automation and artificial intelligence changing the face of recruiting. It’s easy for TA leaders to lose sight of the some of the basics of good recruiting: people relationships. After all…recruiting is a people business.
Bersin also found that the majority of TA leaders (so your peers) agree that their recruiters who have the closest relationships with hiring managers outperform recruiters who are not as connected. Here at Cielo we believe the critical balance to get right is the perfect combination of high-tech for the sake of high-touch. And this is true for both your hiring manager AND your candidate experience.
We can all remember a time when a key hire was missed because a hiring leader held up the hiring process for one reason or another. Maybe you lost the perfect candidate to a competitor because it took too long to get an interview on the hiring manger’s calendar. Or a candidate dropped out of the process because the job role and responsibilities wasn’t different in the eyes of the hiring manager compared to the job description.
It can be easy to point fingers, but the truth is, it’s time for us to take ownership of the hiring manager relationship and work to build an experience that increases communication and alignment so hiring managers are satisfied, recruiters can be successful, and engaged candidates become happy hires. It’s a WIN WIN WIN!
ANNE
KB: An efficient offer and onboarding process ensures a great experience for both the candidate and hiring manager. It provides assurance to the hiring manager the candidate meets pre-employment requirements and provides candidates with consistent communication regarding the onboarding process and start date
AB: Your hiring manager understands what is expected of them during the offer and onboarding process, they are not surprised by the candidate requirements and they feel prepared to onboard and welcome their new employee.
ANNE
Total Compensation: by the time you're ready to make an offer, talent acquisition and the hiring manager should already have a very good idea of the package that an applicant will accept, this needs to start at the job scope not at the end. . Back and forth at this stage can take the process downhill fast. Play out the scenarios with your hiring manger before you extend the offer. Set-up and understanding about what the initial offer is going to look like, but where there is flexibility. Also set your walk-away-point, at what salary mark is it not going to work. Setting up this game plan will allow the recruiter the successfully negotiate with the candidate without having to slow down the process and get approval from hiring the manager with every question or request. Hiring managers with an accepted offer are happy hiring managers
Offer letter template: It sounds simple, but many times we’ve found that our clients don’t have an offer letter template. They have pieces of the offer that are standard, but there isn’t one go-to document template to use. This can lead to frustration on the part of the HM because they don’t have access to all of the information they need or they may miss a key piece of information when extending the offer. Consider building a PDF template that includes editable fields, this will help you lock down the important information that can not change while allowing the hiring manager to drop in the important information. Creating a template and simplifying the letter itself will also help you decrease the human error that can come along with custom documentation and multiple editors and it will eliminate all the back and forth emails and calls that can happen to get an offer letter approved. If your ATS has offer letter template functionality, consider turning on and configuring that part of the system. This helps ensure we don’t lose candidates so close to the finish line and risk the frustration from the HM of having to start over.. Consider one healthcare system who initially had over 30 different types of offers. By streamlining the offer templates and cleaning up where many had been created with very little variance, hiring managers felt less overwhelmed by putting together an offer and reduced their fear of making a mistake. This resulted in a faster time to the offer being extended. CLIENT EXAMPLE??
Onboarding best practice: remember that Hiring Managers are only hiring managers when they have an opening on their team. This means that it is not typically a regular practice to onboard a new hire. After a HM has taken the time to find the right person, it would be frustrating to lose the person shortly after starting due to a bad onboarding experience. Think about how to make the logistics and triggers to hire a new employee easy for your hiring manager. Create a go to guide with links to all the right sites, lists, provisioning triggers etc to help them ensure that their new employee will have a smooth entry. Like a fortune 100 XX company, go one step further and provide some insights and ideas to make the onboarding process memorable for the new employee. Things like remembering to stock their work space with supplies and perhaps a company branded gift, have a welcome letter waiting, setting up lunch with co-workers for the first week and connecting them with a cross functional buddy goes a long way to helping anew employee feel embedded in the company.
ANNE
Never forget that part the experience isn’t a set it and forget it. You have to continually ask for feedback on the process to know where to tweak the experience. Things that weren’t broken 6 mos ago can break, the market and the process changes and you can create experience gaps without realizing it. Surveys regularly and make Short and easy to get engagement. Also do pulse checks , VOC beyond the survey. And finally, whether in the survey or the pulse check follow up and do what you say. That is what creates that trust and relationship that is the top indicator of a successful TA program.
ANNE
Too often we hear from hiring managers that once they submit a requisition, things seem to disappear into a “black hole.” This lack of communication can continue throughout the entire recruiting process, which can leave hiring managers frustrated. Even if your team is working furiously behind the scenes to fill the open role – without any communication to the hiring leader they have no sense of progress.
We have found there are three key things to remember when it comes to strategic communication that will help your team build trust and credibility with their hiring leaders without complicating the process are making it too much of a burden.
Clarify Expectations: At every stage in the process make sure your hiring managers understand what to expect. From the job scope call to the offer process be clear about what the experience will look like and what they can anticipate their role to be. The more prescriptive you are with them at the beginning the smoother the experience.
If hiring managers are not told what to expect in the process, it leads to a lack of understanding between all parties and ultimately a poor candidate and hiring manager experience.
Provide it in every phone call, every email and even in a process guide during the job scope. Remember, HM are only HM when they have an opening. They have a day job the rest o f the time and might miss an action. Close every interaction by telling them what action they need to take and when they will hear form you again. It will build trust and help reduce friction.
Increase Transparency: The biggest piece of advice is increasing transparency – especially for new hiring leaders or those that don’t hire often.
Make it your mission to become a proactive communicator. Over-communicate. This does not have to take all of your time. It can be just a brief email or quick note at key milestones (e.g. invite to intake session after x hours of requisition, email with screening summary of proposed candidates, follow-up call after interviews, updates on candidate offer status). Keeping hiring managers in the loop throughout filling their vacancy goes a long way in building trust. Best practice in our partnerships is that every HM with an open req gets a weekly update from their recruiter to ensure a formal touch in the process. Even if there is no change in status.
Share Accountability: As talent acquisition we own the end-to-end process and the hiring manager owns the hiring decision. It’s important to be committed to quality customer service for your internal leaders, but viewing hiring managers as customers does not mean they are not accountable for many steps in the recruiting process. We establish contracts with external customers, why not with our internal ones? At the start of a search consider breaking down the process to the task level, and work with the Hiring Manager to agree upon roles and turnaround times. Some organizations go as far as creating enforceable service level agreements between talent acquisition and the business. Lots of options here – but the key piece is making sure that both parties go into the process with clear understanding of what they are responsible for to ensure success.
STACEY
Thank you so much Anne and Kathleen
Before we go into questions I want to remind everyone that yes, the presentation was recorded and will be available tomorrow with the slides.
And now, a few questions for you two:
How can you increase Hiring Manager response rates for surveys and general feedback?
What’s your recommendation for a starting point to understand what our current process feels like for a hiring manager?
We have a centralized TA function, but our hiring managers are spread across the country. Any ideas for ways to build relationships?
Thank you again Anne and Kathleen sharing your insights with us today and thank you to everyone that joined us online from around the world. For more information about future webinars please visit our website cielotalent.com. Thank you and have a good rest of your day.