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The More Things Change...

By Jason Weseman, August 16, 2006

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."

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Newsletter, Working With Hiring Managers

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If you've been a regular reader of this newsletter, you will notice that these are some of the same complaints that members of The Adler Group discuss each week. However, these quotes come directly from respondents to our annual hiring and recruiting survey. One of the questions we asked was, "What is the most frustrating aspect of your hiring process today?", and boy, did you answer. These are just a taste of the several hundred responses that we received. We just closed the survey, and I can tell you, the results aren't real pretty. From your perspective, the state of the recruiting industry doesn't look like its going to improve any time soon.

We'll provide the full survey details in upcoming articles and in a free conference call in September (sign up now if you would like to participate). For now, I am going to focus solely on YOUR frustrations and give you my quick take on the major themes that we continue to see:

1. Hiring managers never have enough time. We saw this come up in the quotes from the opening paragraph, and I have to tell you: this one always baffles me. Hiring managers never have enough time to properly define what a candidate will do on the job, so everyone on the hiring team fills in the blanks with their own ideas on what the job really is. If hiring top talent is your #1 priority (and it should be if you want to stay a top manager), then taking an hour of your time to sit with the entire hiring team to clarify what success looks like in this role is critical. From that one hour session, you can produce a document (we call them Performance Profiles) that attracts top people by detailing the 6-8 most important objectives for that role. It will also save you 20 hours of interviewing time on the back end because you'll see better candidates the first time, rather than trying to see if we can get one to fall to us. Of course, if hiring top talent isn't important to you, keep posting traditional job descriptions that focus on requirements rather than opportunities, and you really won't have any time because you'll spend most of it trying to bring them up to average.


2. Hiring managers aren't great at assessing competency or closing top candidates. Here are three more responses to the top frustration question, see if they resonate: 1) "Lack of training for hiring managers in regards to interviewing"; 2) "Hiring managers not 'selling' in the interview. They feel that the candidate should sell them on why we should hire them"; and 3) "The hiring managers don't have a clear idea of what type of people they want. They are weak at decision making." I'm sure this is news to the vast majority of hiring managers who believe that they are great interviewers and use their intuition and candidate first impressions to make a decision about candidate competency. If you've ever asked your hiring manager what they are looking for in a candidate, and heard "Just get me some candidates, I'll know it when I see it", you have experienced the intuition trap first hand. "I'll know it when I see it" really makes it easy for recruiters to find that person, doesn't it? And how frustrating is it when you find a top person and they decline to proceed because the hiring manager didn't position the job properly (and then blames you for a weak candidate)? We advocate an integrated recruiting and closing process, where the interview is just one in a series of steps designed to close top people. If you're not using a process that challenges and makes the job more attractive, you're missing out on the best talent.


3. Hiring managers that won't budge on experience or industry requirements. One final frustration quote: "Managers not understanding that candidates with performance in like-situations and conditions can succeed in our environment and role, despite not having the EXACT qualifications as originally thought of on a wish list." This, in my humble opinion, is the killer. Many hiring managers believe that years of experience, industry knowledge and skills automatically translate to on-the-job results, and that a lack of any of these translates to a lack of candidate competency. Unfortunately, we all know people that were an exact match for the job posting that never delivered squat. We also know many top people that have demonstrated that they can do the work that we need done in an environment similar to ours that didn't get a look because they didn't have "7 years experience". It's simple: if they can do the work that you need done, they have the right mix of skills, experience and responsibilities, whatever that mix is. That leaves it up to you and the hiring team to clearly define the job, then assess the candidate based on their ability to do the job.

Is it just me or do you see a common theme coming out of these frustrations? These were just a fraction of the comments we received regarding hiring managers, and these were the nice ones! Fully 80% of the respondents felt that their hiring managers were one of the biggest problems they faced. The sad, yet not surprising fact: none of this has changed since we started doing these surveys. In fact, it's getting worse. We've stated time and again that without a true partnership between recruiters and their hiring managers, the system is set to fail. We'll delve into how recruiters can move from a transactional to an account-manager model in future articles and on our call revealing the results of our 2006 survey. Sign up for the call and become part of the solution.