Its Valentine's Day - How is your relationship with your Recruiter working?

Are you giving your Recruiter a Valentine’s Card this year?

Are you faced with an unsuccessful recruiting effort? Whether it is for one key role or several, it could be many things, but when it comes down to it blame the recruiting relationship.

“What is the relationship between your managers and the recruiting team?”

I recently posed this question to a VP of Engineering at one of my current clients. It seemed that internal recruiting efforts were failing miserably, consistently lacked a qualified candidate pipeline and the VP and his managers had started to abandon the use of their internal recruiting team.

His answer was, “OK, I guess but my managers tell me they (the recruiters) really don’t understand our requirements, present unqualified candidates and don’t have a sense of urgency.” An expected answer. So I asked this question to the recruiting team, and comments were plenty about their interactions with the hiring managers – incomplete or missing job descriptions, inability to respond timely to presented resumes, changing requirements, jammed calendars, missed interviews and the list went on and on.

Again who is to blame for this? Well it is not really who specifically, but it comes down to how the recruiting team interacts with the hiring managers and vice versa – the relationship. Too often recruiters (I’m not generalizing for all) whether they are external or internal take the job of recruiting as being an “order taker”, that is the manager wants to hire for Position X and the skills are A, B and C. With no other questions for the hiring manager, this becomes the “job order” and the recruiter goes off to fill the candidate pipeline. A few days to weeks later when candidates can’t be found or several unqualified candidates are interviewed, we end up in a situation as described above – an unsuccessful recruiting effort.

In my 12+ years of recruiting experience as both an external/agency recruiter and also as an on-site corporate recruiter, I have entered into many situations where recruiting efforts were viewed as failing, the recruiters were deemed ineffective and lacked the respect of hiring managers. A lot of finger pointing but no real solutions.

Time and time again, I found it came down to fixing the way the recruiter and/or the recruiting team interacted with hiring managers – and yes, most of them were “order takers.” But, it wasn’t that the recruiters were bad recruiters, just not using an effective approach to working with hiring managers.

As Recruiters, our job is to take the initiative to pro-actively drive successful recruiting efforts and change or improve the way we interact with hiring managers. This can be done by taking the effort to meet with them frequently to understand their current and future needs (technical and non-technical), asking questions well beyond the job responsibilities and qualifications, setting and re-setting expectations (yes I am sure some of us have come across some strange, non-existent “purple squirrel” requirements), providing them with an ongoing education about the job market and available talent pool, interview techniques and assessments and most importantly presenting well qualified candidates, either pro-actively or in response to a current opening based on our in-depth understanding of the needs.

Not all hiring managers are initially responsive to this pro-active style (some may call it being pushy), but stay on it -day after day, week after week, and they will come around eventually. It is best to be upfront to set expectations - discussing with them that their full participation in the process, responsiveness and interaction with the recruiter is a major factor in the effectiveness of the overall recruiting effort. With a mutual goal to source and hire great talent, both manager and recruiter will be successful using this approach.

So whether you are an external recruiter, internal corporate recruiter or a VP of Engineering or Director of Human Resources reviewing ways to improve your current recruiting efforts, take a good look the relationship between the recruiting team and the hiring manager. Is the interaction more of the “order taker” or is it an equal partner relationship where there is shared respect for each others time, role, knowledge and expertise?

If the answer is “Order Taker”, pick up the phone and set up those meetings with the hiring managers and start those conversations.

Not sure? Call Recruiting Partners and we can help get you started on implementing a successful recruiting program or source that perfect candidate.

And yes, we are expecting several Client Valentine’s Day cards this year.

Cheers,



Tim Ahern
Managing Director
Recruiting Partners - Executive Search and Technical Recruiting Solutions
http://www.recruitingpartners.com/