Recruiters and Hiring Managers: How to Win at Collaboration

The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers gets a lot of airplay; frequently, it’s tinged with frustration on both sides by a perceived lack of cooperation. But when it comes to collaboration, you don’t have a choice. Recruiters can’t recruit without knowing who to look for, and hiring managers can’t hire without recruiters finding the right candidates.

In today’s rapidly changing hiring landscape, new challenges are emerging to the recruiter/hiring manager relationship. Here’s how both parties can work together to overcome issues:

Make speed as important as quality

Hiring speed is important. That means recruiters and hiring managers need to get on the same page — fast. As hiring picks up in the emerging post-pandemic era, it’s a fact that great hires won’t wait around forever to hear back from a potential employer; thinking in terms of days and weeks rather than seconds and minutes can cost your organization candidates.

To facilitate faster collaboration, recruiters and hiring managers need to educate one another, using their expertise to present solutions to existing problems.

Take a long, hard look at current practices and identify areas for improvement. For example, if a job stays open for two, four or six months, how critical is that role to the business?

Step over the aisle

Knowing how to improve collaboration gets you halfway there; bridging the gap to make that happen is the hard part.

Close-knit relationships between recruiters and hiring managers are now a must-have, and a slow approach to meeting in the middle won’t work. However you may feel about your colleague, you have a shared interest in the organization and its hiring needs.

Some recruiters simply develop an intake form for hiring managers to fill out. While this works for some people, why limit your collaboration to a series of fields and checkboxes?

Instead, get in a room together and talk about the candidates you’re looking for. This can speed up the process without sacrificing the details — as long as you have clear direction and delegation of responsibilities. For instance, decide who will draft the job description and set deadlines to keep all the parts moving.

With collaboration, everyone wins

Vanilla Ice told the world to “stop, collaborate and listen,” so work to overcome any lingering differences. Problem-solving, articulation and allocation of resources correspond directly with outcomes. And when you don’t understand who or what you’re looking for, it’s nearly impossible to ensure positive results.

Speed may trump quality at this moment in hiring, but achieving competitive advantage necessitates a combination of the two throughout your organization. To win at talent acquisition, everyone needs to be on board: both now and in the future.

Better, faster collaboration requires a change in mindset. It means recruiters and hiring managers should resist the temptation to sit around and complain about each other, even when hiring for a particular role is challenging. On the contrary, the two sides must maintain near-constant contact. Candidates feel the urgency of the moment, and so should you.

This article first appeared on Indeed website:

https://www.indeed.com/lead/how-can-recruiters-and-hiring-managers-collaborate?hl=en&co=PH

TalentView is an official partner of Indeed in the APAC region.

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