ConAgra Foods is one of North America's largest packaged food companies. A Fortune 200 company with over 25,000 employees whose products are found in more than 96 percent of American households, with famous brands including Healthy Choice, Banquet, Chef Boyardee, PAM, Reddi-Wip, Egg Beaters, Hunts, Orville Redenbacher's and many more.

Recruiting - a business imperative for hiring managers

I think it was Management 101 where we all learned that as leaders are identified and grow from individual contributor roles to leadership positions, the biggest predictor of success shifts from the quality of their performance to the quality of their team's performance. Today, the fact is that every company is looking for high potential, high quality employees in a diminishing pool of talent. The relative importance of this and the degree of difficulty is illustrated in the points below:

• A Hay Group/Recruiting Roundtable Study found that the relative contribution of a "Star Performer" is more than three times that of an "Average Performer".
• In March 2006, a Gallup Poll/USA Today survey found that 59% of managers said that finding and training enough good people to fill current and future requirements was their most pressing problem.

So it's safe to infer that the importance of talent and raising the talent bar is pretty much a given. On top of that, we are competing with other companies in a global economy to secure the very best talent. What's interesting is that you won't find a lot of commentary out there about the hiring manager's role in this process. Worse yet, to some degree, is that we've led hiring managers to believe that recruiting talent is a function of HR - it's not! It's quite simply one of the most important activities leaders do.

The hiring manager's role in the recruiting process

Several years ago, the Corporate Leadership Counsel surveyed approximately 8,000 recruiters to determine the most critical enabler to effective recruiting. The most common answer was "the hiring manager". In another recent study, the Leadership Council analyzed 30 factors to determine the biggest levers to attract and retain employees. It found that base pay and the quality of the manager were by far the two biggest levers to attract and retain talent.

So, without question, hiring managers are the key to hiring success and yet ironically one of the biggest challenges recruiters face is often the Hiring Manager. This can take the form of lack of clarity on the position, lack of time from the hiring manager, unrealistic expectations or simply disconnects on procedures, roles and responsibilities.

"...recruiting is, above all, a process -
and, like any business process,
it can be simple, accountable and collaborative,
or complex, unaccountable and discordant."

Effective staffing models create a sustainable, scaleable and repeatable process. As we recruit, we want to follow the same process across the organization so that we can measure our results, consistently deliver on those results and continuously improve the quality of our hires.

It's interesting to note that hiring managers who wouldn't dream of approaching their functions or businesses without following some type of standard operating procedure will often take a "shoot from the hip" approach to recruiting. As business partners to our hiring managers, we need to do three things:

1. Counsel and educate our hiring managers on the importance of their engagement in the recruiting process.
2. Let them know that recruiting is a process, and educate them on their role within the process.
3. Make sure that they hold us (HR) accountable for delivering the best, diverse talent, and understand that they have a shared accountability in collaborating with us to recruit and retain this talent.

Seven keys for highly effective hiring managers

Given this landscape, here are a few keys that hiring managers can use to unlock the door to efficient and effective recruiting:

I. Planning:

Often our urgency to implement (recruit) translates into a lack of planning. This can lead to sub-optimized outcomes in recruiting if we haven't properly considered our organizational design, leadership team alignment, competencies, etc. Also, this is a good time to look at your internal talent to determine if you'll need to look externally in your search.

II. Specification meeting:

A good job description (which I think is an oxymoron) is an important starting point. But a specification meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter and HR partner is critical in order to determine what the "optimal" profile is, discuss the current labor market, review any anticipated obstacles and provide needed perspective for the recruiter on career paths, selling points of the position, experience or history of the hiring manager, etc.

III. Help your recruiter learn what good looks like:

The recruiter's role is to minimize the amount of time that it takes a hiring manager to recruit, source and screen high-quality talent. In order to do this, the hiring manager needs to make an upfront investment to ensure that the recruiter understands what "great" looks like. Aside from the spec meeting, this includes some simple but important steps, such as talking about the profiles of some of the best people in their department or, if possible, meeting with some of those top performers on their team. In addition, giving "detailed" feedback on why they liked or didn't like a specific candidate is critical to on-going calibration. The more this is done the better the recruiter should be able to deliver the right talent to the hiring manager.

IV. Avoid the common pitfalls:

I could discuss a lot in this section, but let me give you the Big Three:

1. Changes to the specification - a lot of the heavy lifting in recruiting is done during the first two to four weeks. It's when recruiters work hardest to source and screen talent. Any changes a hiring manager makes after the spec meeting creates a lot of wasted effort for recruiting.
2. The Industry Experience Trap - industry experience is not only highly overrated but it's also the quickest way to sub-optimize the talent you recruit. If you think of the pool of top-quality, top-quartile talent, the minute you say they must come out of the "food industry or the high tech industry" you've reduced that pool of available talent by about 98%! The fact is that for the majority of our jobs, top talent with high learning agility can learn the nuances of our industry, but industry-experienced candidates who do not possess high learning agility will never become top talent or future leaders for you!
3. The most important metric isn't time-to-fill - when you ask most hiring managers about recruiting metrics, the first one they mention is time-to-fill. To me, it's the least important metric and one that you want to score "average" on - whatever that metric is for your industry, function or job. Hold your recruiters to the "highest standards" for quality and diversity. A year from now, you really won't remember whether it took seven or ten weeks to fill that job, but you will live with the quality of the hire for a long time!

V. Communicate, communicate, communicate:

By now, I'm sure it's clear that recruiting really is collaboration among the hiring manager, HR partner and recruiter. To ensure that the partnership is most effective, communication needs to be on going and robust. At a minimum, a weekly update meeting should take place beginning within two to three weeks from the project initiation.

VI. Removing roadblocks:

1. Time is the enemy - for recruiters, this is a given. The best talents have many options in the marketplace and they're not going to wait for lengthy interview cycles or cumbersome decision-making processes.
2. Make sure interview teams are aligned and determine who makes the hiring decision - using multiple interviewers really can increase the quality of the hiring decision. However, it's critical to ensure that all interviewers are aligned on the hiring profile and that they send a consistent message to the candidate on the position, company and culture. Also, if you have seven interviewers get all of their input - but don't set the expectations that all seven have to endorse the hire.

VII. Selling the opportunity:

Remember that the best candidates are also interviewing us. They are assessing how we measure up to their expectations in relation to the job, the vision and the caliber of our leadership, the quality of our hiring manager, the quality of their peers, compensation, benefits, career path and culture. As a result, it really is incumbent upon everyone that participates in the interviewing process to devote some time to addressing these topics, selling the opportunity and insuring that the "candidate experience" is a good one for the interviewee.

As their subject matter experts in recruiting, Staffing Leaders need to help their Hiring Managers understand our processes and systems. Hiring Managers are both customers and key contributors to this process. Their role is critical because at the end of the day we don't own staffing - they do!