In the world of recruitment there are two major stakeholders in the process (excluding the candidate, of course), the recruiter and the hiring manager. While they both have the same objective in mind, to hire the ‘best candidate’, what that could mean is quite subjective. Many would say that a recruiter will consider the ‘on paper’ qualifications that a candidate has, to determine if they’re suitable. Do they have a degree? What school did they attend? How many years of experience do they have? A hiring manager needs to work with this person daily, and so they take into account the personality of the candidate. Would they fit into the team dynamic? Would they be challenging to manage? In the end, there seems to be a breakdown in the process of recruitment between these two parties, if you asked either why that was the case, it would sound a bit like this:
Recruiter: The hiring manager never commits enough time to meeting with the candidates. The time to fill a role ends up being much longer as a result.
Hiring Manager: The recruiter continuously schedules me for 1-hour interviews with ill suited candidates; I don’t have time for this!
Both parties have valid reasons for frustration, but what’s important is how they move forward. Here are some steps to get them both on the same team.
This goes beyond academics and years of experience. What type of personality are they looking for? What are their deal breakers? Sometimes understanding what they don’t want in a candidate is a good place to start.
What questions should be asked? What answers are we hoping to hear? But please, oh please, let’s skip asking ‘what is your greatest weakness?’ as you’ll find that all of your candidates work too hard and care too much.
This may sound challenging since securing the hiring managers time is already an issue, but hear me out, there is a way it can be done. A typical interview process would include a 30-minute phone interview from the recruiter, who would then decide whether or not to have the candidate in to meet the hiring manager for the second round, typically a one hour interview. If we made the initial interview assessment a collaborative decision, then we would eliminate ‘bad’ candidates being pushed forward for the face-to-face, only the great ones. Automated interviews allow you to create a template of video questions (apply step two) to be sent to candidates, to which they can respond to with a recorded video. Both recruiter and hiring manager can review the answers, or specific segments of the interview, before moving the candidate to the next step. In the same amount of time it would take to interview one candidate in-house, they could look at the video applications from 10-60 candidates. A huge time savings for both the hiring manager and recruiter.
In the end, hiring managers will learn to see recruiters as their allies in the effort to find great teammates and get a better appreciation of the structured interview. If the traditional way of working together hasn’t been successful, perhaps it’s time to try something new.
