Over the past few months I’ve been describing a new approach for determining quality of hire, and using changes in this to justify any new expenditures on an ROI basis. While the methodology is pretty slick, the pushback is coming not from the process, but from the idea that HR/recruiting is responsible for quality of hire at all.

If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Take a look at this letter from your hiring manager. As you read it, make it personal. Put your name at the top. Think of a hiring manager you think would send you something like this and put his or her name at the bottom. Then send it to a hiring manager who is the least likely person to send it. Hiring top people is a two-way street. Unfortunately, for most recruiters it's always uphill.

Dear (put your name here),

I'm frustrated. You've let me down too many times to let this continue. As your client, I believe your performance must improve in order to succeed in building and developing a strong team. Your role is critical, but somehow you've trivialized it. I don't want to see average candidates anymore and I don't want to see people who are obvious misfits. You need to take on a bigger role in this process, be more involved, and become more of a consultant than a vendor.

However, with that said, I am not without fault here. Since I want you to have an equal stake in the outcome, I must be more involved in the process from beginning to end. With this in mind let's describe our new partnership relationship in finding and hiring more A-level talent.

In Part I of this article, I made the contention that there were so many different people involved in the hiring process that consensus was impossible to reach. This included HR and OD, recruiters and sourcers, hiring managers and everyone on the hiring team, and lest we forget, the candidates themselves. In the government contractor hiring process this problem is made worse since the actual hiring manager is sometimes difficult to identify and recruiters tend to work off marginal job specs.

Here's a basic truism: the further the recruiter is from the hiring manager, the less effective he or she will be in finding top performers. It's pretty obvious that the better you know the hiring manager and the job you're representing, the more insightful and professional you'll be when sourcing, qualifying, and recruiting candidates.

Recruiters who aren't partners or closely aligned with their hiring manager clients regarding real job needs send in too many unqualified candidates and have little influence with them. Collectively, this makes it difficult to close the candidate, overcome basic concerns, and to even get referrals.

By becoming partners with their hiring manager clients, recruiters can use their influence to better defend their candidates from dumb decisions and poorly designed practices and policies. The key to the defense requires intervening at each step of the assessment and selection process, while fighting soft emotions with hard evidence.

Here are some things you can do to get started:

If you want to hire top quality candidates in the shortest period of time at a reasonable cost, you'll need to organize your team to meet the ever more challenging recruiting demands of your company.

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: