Our recently completed 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed some significant conflicts between recruiters and their hiring managers that aren't abating. Between 50-60% of the survey respondents indicated these were significant problems at their companies:

Does this sound familiar? "We are treated as short order cooks with staffing reqs when a position is vacated". Or maybe this one hits close to home for you: "Our hiring managers have unrealistic expectations, expecting above average performances and backgrounds in candidates while paying average salaries". And two comments that really crystallize the frustrations that recruiters are feeling today: "Hiring managers won't put in the time to clarify their exact needs" and "My biggest frustration is manager availability - it is very difficult to get time with managers and move candidates through the interview process in a timely manner."

Engineers and software development managers are the toughest hiring managers in the world to deal with. But that's only if you exclude sales managers, marketing managers, company executives, operations people, customer service managers, functional VPs, and of course, financial people at all levels.

I've been advocating the use of the iPod as a metaphor for better hiring practices. If you have an iPod, you know that it's much more than a music player. It's a complete, integrated music system. You can quickly download music and podcasts, burn CDs, and plug it into your car, home music system or Bose speaker set. You don't even have to read the instructions to do any of this stuff and get great music anytime, anywhere.

If it wasn't for hiring managers, recruiting would be so easy. This is one of the conclusions drawn from my annual Recruiting and Hiring Challenges Survey 2005. Here are some other preliminary conclusions from the survey results:

There are more name-generating tools becoming available everyday. My favorites include Jobster, SearchExpo, Broadlook, ZoomInfo, AIRS Oxygen, and LinkedIn. These and the other networking tools should be checked out and used. But there’s more to recruiting and hiring passive candidates than generating a list of names. Success with these tools depends on how well you convert these cold names into hot candidates. Here are some other factors that need to be considered when hiring passive candidates:

Here are a few random observations on a summer's day, as I contemplate what I'm going to say at ERE's upcoming ER Expo 2004 Fall in Boston on the state of hiring. Interesting. We're having a mild pickup in hiring and everyone is panicking (according to the Bush team we've turned the corner, and according to the Kerry team it's a U-turn, but that's a different article).