We know the relationship between recruiter and hiring manager is not always as plain sailing as it should be.

As a recruiter, you may focus so highly on creating a positive candidate experience that your hiring managers often get put on the backburner.

But building a strong relationship with your hiring managers is just as important as it is with candidates.

And in fact, it can actually have just as big of an impact on your recruitment goals.

Not recognising them as a key, team player will create more work for you in the long run and risk impairing the candidate experience you have worked so hard to attain.

Candidates may begin to drop off, reject you, badly publicise you and in the worst cases, refuse to have anything further to do with you as a candidate or, even as a consumer.

Yet much to your concern, surely you would prefer to be reducing your time to hire, improving the quality of those hires, and boosting your candidates experience intern. Here is how.

Work Towards the Same Goal

Firstly, remember that you are working towards the same objective, to fill the position with top talent. This means that your relationship should be a partnership, not a battleground. But with your day-to-day duties being very different from that of a hiring manager, you may find that you often receive two completely different perspectives on how the hiring process should be approached. The challenge is to establish one approach that works for everyone. The hiring manager needs to know what they want, and you need to be there to say what is achievable. After all, no one knows the realities of the talent market better than you.

Offer Training

Hiring Managers will not have the most extensive experience managing talent or at least, not on the same level as a recruiter. So, to help your relationship move more smoothly, training can be useful. Maybe you need to cover the professional way to conduct an interview or the best way to approach a selection process. Do they know what questions to ask, what not to ask, how to avoid unconscious bias? The red flags to spot, how to create good first impressions or how to promote your employer brand? It is also worth considering sharing real-time data with them, so they can fully understand the constraints of the market. Perhaps the aspects of time to hire, the reasons candidates drop off or what actually classes as a ‘quality’ candidate.

Engage with Them from The Start

Hiring is a process. One that a hiring manager may not be all that familiar with as we said, so to help, try to involve them when and where you can and keep them informed throughout. You also need to establish early on what your hiring manager needs from a hire. Although, it is worth mentioning that hiring managers are not always the best at picturing their perfect candidate, especially in a way that you can apply to your sourcing strategies. With this in mind, it can be good to get them to answer a shortlist of questions that will make your job easier. Such as, what the candidate must have, what are nice to have, what projects they will be responsible for, what challenges they would need overcome, and so on. Once you can source some relevant candidate profiles, you can then show these to the hiring manager and see who fits the bill before going any further with the process.

Make Use of Technology

Technology is one of your biggest friends when it comes to collaborative hiring. As a recruiter, technology such as an ATS plays a huge part in your recruitment process, helping to source, manage and engage talent. But there is no reason why the hiring manager cannot be a part of this as well. Like a candidate, Hiring Managers need to be engaged throughout the entire recruitment process. One way to achieve this is to provide the Hiring Manager’s with a Portal into your recruitment system. This helps to streamline your companies hiring structure while still meeting organisational demands. Through the hiring managers portal, a hiring manager can review the hiring status, inputting when and where they need to. The Recruitive Hiring Managers Portal in particular, is synced to the main ATS to allow a hiring manager to be present at the points in which the recruiter allows and includes key functions such as a request to recruit.

Build a Talent Pool

Talent pools are another great way to hire collaboratively. By pro-actively storing pre-screened candidates in your talent pool, you can hire more quickly in the future. Beneficial for everybody, right? Having successfully created a profile of candidates that your hiring managers are satisfied with, those who become unsuccessful later in the hiring process can be, stored upon consent, usually safety within your Applicant Tracking System. This then becomes an internal source of talent that both you and the hiring manager can utilise. Reducing the need to use external sourcing methods which cost more time and money. This is the difference between proactive and reactive hiring, by already having a warm pool of talent ready to fill a role before the role is even open.

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Recruitive offer End to End Recruitment Solutions from ATS Software, Cloud Based Recruitment Software, Onboarding Software, Media Purchasing & the Design of Careers Websites.