The Hiring Manager Conundrum: Whose Job Is It Anyway

The Hiring Manager Conundrum
by Bill Boorman
2015 © Take the Interview

Introduction
Here at Take the Interview, we’ve been thinking a lot recently about how, exactly, today’s hiring
funnel actually works and what real recruiting processes really looks like. That’s why we decided to
ask the key stakeholders and decision makers on the front lines of for their take on what it takes to
survive – and thrive – in today’s increasingly competitive and cutthroat market for top talent.
From candidates to hiring managers to recruiters themselves, we wanted to hear first hand what it
takes to successfully attract, engage, screen and select the right candidate for the right role the right
way.
We recently gathered the gamut of these stakeholders together at the Kaplan Education corporate
headquarters in New York to discuss some of the biggest issues and most pressing challenges and
pervasive issues impacting hiring and recruiting, and what organizations need to do to recruit and
retain top talent tomorrow.
Since we wanted the conversation to be as open, direct and honest as possible, we swore that we’d
keep the identities of this multitude of stakeholders, from CHROs at Fortune 50 employers to agency
recruiters to transitioning workers, completely anonymous. Turns out, taking away the fear of taking
off the filter rendered some really, really interesting responses. While we concealed the identities
associated with these answers, the issues and challenges identified should sound familiar to anyone
who’s looked for a job or a candidate lately.
That’s why we put together this “slight paper” – in fairness, it’s not really robust enough to be
considered a white paper, but it should provide some interesting insights and invaluable resources
about how recruiters can improve recruiting efficiency and efficacy – not to mention candidate
experience – by improving how recruiters can build relationships, develop partnerships and deliver
results to their respective hiring managers and stakeholders.
We’re tired of every hearing how recruiting is broken – and the fact is, with unemployment at its
lowest level in years and more people finding more jobs than ever before, that might be a somewhat
misleading statement to begin with.
But that’s not to say there’s not a lot that needs fixing – and as the #TruNewYork conversation
revealed, learning to define and drive shared accountability between the hiring managers, applicants
and recruiters involved in the hiring process represents a critical first step.
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While each respective stakeholder traditionally and expediently passes the baton of blame instead of
accepting real responsibility, this poor experience leads to poor results – and unwanted outcomes –
for everyone involved. That’s why this slight paper has some big ideas from the feedback we received
in the Big Apple, and some of the solutions that just might help make a big difference in your ability
to compete for – and win – the best and the brightest candidates today while retaining and
developing internal top talent for tomorrow’s workforce needs.
Before we jump into their answers, I’d be remiss to not personally thank each and every one of our
individual contributors who got involved and helped inform the outcome of this research. You know
who you are, and you know how you helped – and also know how much it’s appreciated.
I look forward to continuing the conversation, and hope that this provokes a few thoughts and maybe
even some new ideas on how best to manage hiring managers and drive recruiting success while
delivering delightful experiences to every stakeholder at every stage of the hiring process.
I can’t wait to hear from you, too.
Cheers,
Bill Boorman
Lead Advisor, Take The Interview 
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Whose Job Is It, Anyway?
In a recent presentation by Grant Weinberg, the Director of Talent Acquisition for EMEA at biotech
leader Gilead Sciences, Weinberg outlined the changing responsibilities for hiring within his own
organization and many other enterprise employers, and the overall impact of this evolution on
recruiting, where business as usual seems to be anything but these days.
Weinberg revealed a recent pilot program he oversaw at Gilead, shifting ultimate accountability for
successfully recruiting and onboarding a candidate to the hiring manager and line of business
leadership, while holding talent acquisition responsible for managing the process and focusing
primarily ensuring a great experience – and optimal outcomes – for candidates and clients alike.
This shift in responsibility, coupled with the hiring managers continued need for recruiters in order to
drive the outcomes for which they were ultimately on the line, resulted in significant success simply
by making closer collaboration between talent acquisition and their hiring managers inexorably
intertwined with their standard recruiting processes.
With improved quality of hire and lowered cost and time to fill, the results of this program clearly
demonstrate the value in reinforcing and strengthening the relationship between talent acquisition
and the actual business they support. Another result of bifurcating recruiting responsibility is that
recruiters are increasingly seen as an enabler in the process instead of a barrier. By aligning talent
acquisition as a true support function dedicated to serving its clients and helping them achieve their
hiring performance related KPIs, there’s a greater focus by both parties on getting hiring done, not
passing the buck and the blame when it doesn’t - and in those situations, it almost never does. Funny
how that works, isn’t it?
Next we’re going to take a look at the point of view from recruiters themselves, and some of the most
common problems and challenges they encounter when trying to manage hiring managers who lose
that focus on hiring and treat recruiting as a secondary concern to other business needs. After all, it’s
not their job – it’s the recruiters. This mistaken mindset can prove costly – and have a direct impact
on the bottom line, as Weinberg revealed.
As he was wrapping up his presentation, Weinberg revealed statistical proof from the pilot program
that only reiterated the already overwhelming business case for this change in recruiting
responsibilities.
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By concentrating on the cost of open positions and the lost revenue these represented, Weinberg was
able to show the P&L implications of his proposed changes to the Board of Directors, who signed off
on fundamentally altering the responsibilities and accountabilities associated with talent acquisition
throughout the organization.
This decision continues to deliver significant dividends for Gilead, with improved hiring performance
and recruiting outcomes throughout the business – and a more scalable, sustainable and successful
strategy for recruiting and retaining the top talent responsible for driving the organization’s record
revenues, stock price and shareholder value. These are pretty hard outcomes for any business to
argue.
Risk Management Services (RMS) recently adopted a similar approach through an organizational
initiative led by Amelia Merrill, whose success steering this program as the VP of Talent Acquisition,
HR Operations and Employee Engagement led to her assuming her current role as Chief Human
Resources Officer, the head honcho at an organization with over 1200 employees with 10 global
offices.
Merrill convinced RMS to adopt a hiring manager driven approach to recruiting, largely as a response
to the growing demand and competition for qualified talent the organization was increasingly forced
to face.
By restructuring and reallocating the respective responsibilities of recruiters and hiring managers,
RMS was able to adopt a much more candidate-centric approach to hiring, shifting focus from placing
a premium on process to having that process defined by the people ultimately driving that process.
By being able to focus on proactively engaging and supporting candidates instead of simply
supporting the process, recruiters were able to deliver exceptional experiences and ultimately, better
candidates, a spike in qualified applicants and a jump in referrals as their reputation for recruiting
excellence quickly spread. This wouldn’t be possible if their hiring managers didn’t shoulder
responsibility for managing the process and the offer and recruiters stayed stuck more or less acting
as disintermediated intermediaries pushing paper, not promoting people.
Needless to say, their results have set them apart from their competition and positioned them as an
employer of choice – and it’s not only candidates that are taking notice. RMS was recently recognized
for its adoption of candidate centered recruiting with its second consecutive Candidate Experience
Award, taking top honors in both the US and the UK, the only company to have achieved this. And
rightfully so, considering the business and bottom line results RMS has realized as a result of
changing its talent acquisition approach.
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Some specific best practices RMS has adopted include things like ensuring hiring managers are
accountable for interviewing qualified candidates identified by recruiters the same day they’re
submitted, expediting the hiring process while speeding decision making so that candidates receive
feedback and notification of next steps or status as quickly as possible.
This concierge-like approach to candidates, and providing them with exceptional service and a
positive experience irrespective of recruiting outcome, are seen as core organizational competencies;
in terms of performance management, hiring even represents a core competency by which RMS
evaluates and measures its managers.
Each manager has their individual performance measured against specific business KPIs as well as
candidate experience scorecards and recruiter feedback, which in turn form a significant component
of managers’ overall performance reviews, and consequently, their own career prospects and
professional development opportunities. Turns out, when hiring managers have real repercussions
associated with recruiting, this forced focus unilaterally leads to improved results and measurable
improvements in metrics that really matter – because every candidate is also a potential customer,
giving them the best possible experience is just good business.
And business, at RMS at least, is very good indeed, with yet another quarter of record revenue growth
and more new hires than ever before – further proof of that these outcomes are really two sides of the
same recruiting coin.
This change, of course, wasn’t easy at first – and managers were understandably upset when this
change was rolled out to the organization, as many felt unskilled, untrained or otherwise unable to
interview candidates effectively enough to assess competencies while providing meaningful feedback
to those candidates or the recruiters they’re working with.
The ability to provide timely, valuable and insightful feedback, of course, is critical to refining and
reengineering the recruiting process and associated strategies. Those companies that measure hiring
managers on their ability to do so have reinforced this core competencies by providing direction,
training and support to their hiring managers, which in turn, has improved hiring processes and
recruiting outcomes across the board.
They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure, but if your managers are measured on hiring
performance, turns out, that performance inevitably improves – as does your organization’s ability to
attract, engage and recruit top talent.
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In the case of RMS, all hiring managers were provided with ongoing training in interviewing and
selection best practices, including establishing and reinforcing company wide standards and best
practices around recruiting as part of every manager’s professional development plan and
performance criteria.
This was underscored by developing consistent benchmarks and standardized scorecards for hiring
managers, making recruiters responsible for scoring their relative competence and performance
across the entire hiring process, providing an extra incentive for building a deeper relationship and
working partnership with their recruiting counterparts.
One notable improvement reported as a result of RMS’ strategic change was that by forcing hiring
managers to assume the responsibility to personally deliver feedback to candidates and recruiters,
their receptiveness to training – and recruiting results – significantly improved, as did the quality of
the interviews and feedback provided to candidates after each hiring manager successfully completed
the associated coursework.
The lesson we can all learn from RMS is that hiring managers aren’t necessarily experts at hiring, and
require ongoing training, professional development and accountability for the improved hiring
outcomes that come with measurable metrics and actionable analytics associated with recruiting
success.
We’ll talk about some other ways to overcome some other critical, yet common, hiring manager skills
gaps a little later on in the paper, but for now, let’s turn to a company that’s not only one of the
world’s largest employers, but also, one of its largest HR technology companies: Oracle.
Anne-Marie O’Donnell, Oracle Vice President of EMEA Recruiting, reports she’s taken a more
pragmatic approach to hiring at the organization, moving talent acquisition teams from traditional
recruiting related tasks like interviewing, offer negotiation and onboarding. Instead, recruiters now
focus primarily on more proactive, value-added activities like sourcing, screening, qualifying and
submitting candidates instead of spending so much time closely managing those already under
consideration.
As part of this organizational transformation, Oracle surveyed their recruiting team about their
biggest challenges, frustrations or capability gaps in the recruiting process. The most common
feedback from the recruiters centered, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the manifold issues they face when
working with hiring managers, particularly their almost universal unresponsiveness or extremely
slow turnaround in providing feedback on candidates previously presented by the recruiters.
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This feedback loop not only slowed the hiring process significantly, but it often meant losing top
talent to competitors who were able to move more quickly in driving hiring decisions and extending
offers, which only increased an already obvious business case for improving the timeliness and
efficacy by which hiring managers made candidate decisions and deliver feedback.
O’Donnell resolved this endemic organizational issue by creating a internal billing system that
charged the business unit or hiring team a penalty for every day a vacancy was live in talent
acquisition, with these costs coming directly from the stakeholder’s budget as a way to facilitate faster
feedback and streamlining recruiting processes and decision making. Moreover, O’Donnell
completely overhauled the role of individual recruiters, removing the administrative burden created
by tasks like paperwork, scheduling and conducting in person interviews or calculating
compensation.
Recruiters became accountable solely for finding and presenting candidates for open positions –
actually closing those candidates, and requisitions, became the exclusive responsibility of the hiring
managers themselves.
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Lean Hiring
Talent Acquisition
Team Members
source applicants,
prequalify candidates
& act as project managers
Hiring Managers
interview qualiﬁed candidates,
expedite decision-making
& hold ultimate accountability
for successful hiring
timely
&
meaningful
feedback

As a result of this change, Oracle has seen success in closing out an exceptionally heavy open req load
and managing consistently high volumes of ongoing hiring necessitated at an employer with their
relative size, complexity and scale – and this new proactive approach has meant more candidates are
getting through the process, and accepting offers, than previously possible under the old model.
While RMS, Oracle and Gilead are drastically different companies, with disparate talent needs and
recruiting challenges, each success story shares a common theme: lean hiring. Each of these
organizations successfully bifurcated the recruiting process, putting talent acquisition on point for all
sourcing and everything up to the point of apply, and making the hiring manager responsible for the
bulk of the rest of the activities associated with the recruiting process.
Could this division of responsibilities of accountability and shared responsibility for outcomes
become a best practice that every employer should be adopting? Are these early adopters a sign of
things to come or outliers doomed to obsolescence?
To get a sense of what the average recruiter, hiring manager or candidate thinks, we asked them for
their thoughts on this potential new paradigm for talent acquisition and recruiting.
This is what they told us – and without naming names, one thing becomes clear: the need to manage
hiring managers, by any means necessary, is necessary to fix what’s broken in recruiting and hiring.
What Recruiters Think About Hiring Managers
We asked recruiters to provide us candid feedback on what, exactly, their current relationship with
hiring managers looks like, and what they think could be done to improve the collaboration and
communication with their clients and internal customers.
From the answers we received, it seems most recruiters and employers still have quite a ways to go.
Just consider these comments.
“I only ever hear back when they want to interview. I never know the reason for
the rejection.”
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“It’s not uncommon to wait two weeks for feedback on a résumé, and then I’m
expected to fix interviews immediately.”
“We try to hire blind from very old job specifications. I don’t really know what the
hiring managers are looking for, so it becomes a bit of a hit and miss in
presenting.”
“The first thing I did when I got here was to spend more time with the hiring
managers and be more demanding. This caused a rocky relationship for a while,
‘till I took a more collaborative approach. We are in this together- it’s more about
education than being demanding and stomping my feet to get things done. I get
useful feedback now, which is helpful in improving candidate experience and
getting the search right.”
“It’s a bit like bowling. I set them up and they knock them down. Last man
standing wins. Organizing the hiring managers to be available for an interview or
phone screen can be a bit like herding cats.”
Wow. Listening to this type of feedback, it’s not hard to sense the animosity and endemic mistrust
resulting from the huge divide between recruiters and hiring managers, and the resulting “us vs.
them” mentality that was a recurring theme in these and many other conversations. For the most
part, this can all be distilled into two fundamental problems: weak processes and poor collaboration.
Fixing these problems starts by clearly defining roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for both
hiring managers and recruiters throughout the organization; furthermore, employers who make
hiring a core competency and successfully tie recruiting outcomes to bigger business issues like
revenue growth and performance management quickly solve these problems due to forced
collaboration, faster feedback and more streamlined policies and processes.
These best-in-class employers are, sadly, the exception rather than the rule, but there are encouraging
signs that the tides might be changing along with the rapidly evolving talent acquisition landscape.
Surveys repeatedly reiterate the critical importance talent plays in driving business success (they’re
every company’s ‘greatest asset,’ as the tired cliché holds), but the hiring manager and recruiter
relationship often devalues that asset.
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By forcing recruiters to vacuum deduct job requirements for positions they don’t understand or being
provided with any modicum of meaningful feedback, organizations aren’t only alienating talent, but
also undercutting their recruiting ROI by not providing recruiters with the basic tools they need to
succeed.
While hiring managers blame recruiters for not getting what they’re looking for or not submitting
enough qualified candidates quickly enough, recruiters similarly feel that they’re being set up for
failure by hiring managers to whom they ascribe the exact same shortcomings as their counterparts
across the aisle.
Funny thing is, when we spoke with applicants, that lack of understanding a role or providing timely
feedback was blamed squarely on recruiters, instead, so there seems to be universal agreement about
what’s wrong with talent acquisition today, but very little consensus on who’s ultimately responsible
for fixing it.
The answer is relatively simple: recruiting is everyone’s responsibility. But from a recruiter’s point of
view, there are three basic steps every talent practitioner can take to better manage hiring managers
and oversee optimal outcomes for recruiting and hiring:
1) Treat every job like a new assignment. Even if you’ve ﬁlled the role before, don’t
use the same old job description – work with the hiring manager to create a new
one, and before even posting it externally, make sure you’ve got a new sourcing
strategy built around this new JD. 
 
Remember: while the duties may sound similar, every job is unique. 
 
Never, ever start a search without ﬁrst having a meeting between the recruiter
responsible for the requisition and the hiring manager to kick off the search,
formulate a strategy and sourcing plan.
2) Before beginning a search, formalize a statement of work between hiring
manager and recruiter clearly outlining the accountabilities and responsibilities
expected during the course of the search – and a plan of action for what happens
if those expectations aren’t met. 
 
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Generally, recruiters take responsibility for sourcing, screening and submitting
candidates who meet a preapproved standard, and must do so within a
preapproved timeframe. Hiring managers, conversely, generally assume
responsibility for providing timely feedback, completing each step of the hiring
process within a predetermined time frame, and being accountable for driving
the selection, offer and onboarding process once a successful candidate is
identiﬁed.
3) The hiring manager should make a commitment prior to the search – and set
aside speciﬁc time on their schedules – to provide meaningful feedback on all
submissions, and ultimately own passing that feedback directly to recruiters
and/or applicants. 
 
The way feedback is captured and communicated should be fully transparent,
tracked throughout the process and be fully visible to all stakeholders to ensure
ongoing compliance while providing a way to capture and share this feedback
with the hiring and recruiting team.
Implementing these small steps at the front of the process can preempt many big issues from arising
as the search progresses, eliminating many of the most common sources of friction between hiring
managers and talent acquisition organizations while building and strengthening relationships (and
trust) between these two functions – which is the long term key to realizing recruiting ROI and
ensuring your recruiting strategies are scalable, sustainable and successful.
This is an outcome, of course, that both recruiters and hiring managers can agree on. Turns out, no
matter how big the divide between these two sides might seem, we’re all on the same team – and are
working towards the same goal. See, we’re not so different, after all.
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What Hiring Managers Think About Recruiters
While our conversations revealed that recruiters and hiring managers rarely see eye to eye, you
wouldn’t know it from the perceptions hiring managers had about working with recruiters, which
seemed more or less to mirror the recruiters’ comments.
These six hiring manager quotes about what they expect from recruiters – and whether or not those
expectations are being met - provide a clear view into just how pervasive and deeply entrenched this
problematic disconnect between the two sides has really become within the bigger picture of
recruiting and hiring:
“We depend on the TA team to save us time. I only want to see suitable people and
I want to see no more than three. TA sources and qualifies- they are usually good
at that. I have no idea how they do it.”
“The problem is that we don't really know what we want until we see it. We have
an idea on the skills, but jobs are very much built around people. This means our
recruiters have to fix plenty of interviews to get the right one.”
“For the past twelve months, hiring has been included in my objectives, including
things like time and cost per hire. Whilst I will go to the recruiters for help, mostly
we deal with our own recruiting.”
“I rely on the recruiters to do all the first round interviews. I have never been
trained in interviewing. I wouldn't expect a recruiter to be able to code- hiring is
the same for me. They choose who fits, and I choose who I like.”
“The recruiters are fine for anything not technical, but once we need someone with
tech skills, it’s easier to do it ourselves, which means doing our own marketing and
sourcing. We also do a lot of referrals.”
“I always want to see six candidates per job because I like to have choices. It’s also
our company policy. This sometimes means hiring takes longer than we would
like. I know that this is not always easy for our recruiters and they can get
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frustrated with us. I don’t feel our relationship is good, particularly when we
decide not to hire.”
These types of comments are variations on the same theme that repeatedly arises when discussing
recruiting with hiring managers, that when they’re tasked with increased responsibilities and
accountabilities related to hiring, they feel overwhelmed and underprepared.
Rarely are they equipped with the ability to successfully translate the highly technical, highly nuanced
requirements they need in a highly specialized role into the language recruiters really need to
proactively discover and engage potential candidates. Similarly, recruiters rarely work to equip hiring
managers with the tips and tricks of the talent trade, and both sides tend to silo their expertise
instead of share it.
The benefits of hiring managers educating recruiters on their business, and recruiters helping educate
their managers on talent acquisition best practices are obvious, but are too often overlooked. Sharing
this professional expertise is an essential first step in bridging the divide and creating the kind of
communication and collaboration critical for landing top talent in today’s increasingly competitive
candidate marketplace.
Hiring managers need to invest more time in briefing recruiters and giving them the kind of feedback
that they can learn from – and improve their efficacy and understanding of their business so that the
recruiter can better represent that business to potential candidates while more effectively screening
them for highly technical requirements and specialized skills.
Recruiters, similarly, must brief their hiring managers on the importance of candidate experience, set
realistic expectations and help train their hiring managers on the basics. Many hiring managers we
spoke to reported that they felt frustrated by the lack of training or tools they receive for improving
their recruiting efficacy, even at organizations where their hiring performance is formally monitored
and measured. While hiring manager training seemed widely lacking for many of those we spoke
with, the few who did receive the training reported improved outcomes and positive impacts on their
hiring skills, with improved metrics and associated analytics at those companies that have made this
a core management competency. They also supported receiving informal support and hands-on
training from their talent acquisition team, which many ascribed to successfully building a
collaborative partnership with the recruiters they work with.
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Even if your organization doesn’t have a formal program, remember that while you might not be an
expert on every position you open, you are an expert in sourcing, screening and selection, and you
and your hiring manager have a lot to teach other.
Here are three top takeaways for hiring managers looking to step up their recruiting game:
1) Hiring is a core management competency, and should be linked directly to key
performance indicators (KPIs) and rewards for exceeding these benchmarks.
This requires standardizing and formalizing your measurement and feedback
processes. 
 
The easiest way to do this is by linking these optimal outcomes to a service level
agreement (SLA) with quantifiable outcomes and measurable metrics that are
established between talent acquisition and the hiring manager before starting
any search.
2) Recruiters need to be responsible for understanding and agreeing to the criteria
defined during an intake meeting, and sourcing, qualifying and assessing
candidates against this criteria. 
 
It’s the hiring manager’s responsibility to make sure that they’re able to provide
ongoing feedback and direction to the recruiter to refine and optimize their
processes, to schedule interviews in a timely manner, and give both the
candidate and recruiter timely, consistent feedback and clear next steps at each
stage of the hiring process.
3) Hiring managers need to approach recruiting for an open role as an integral part
of their job, and must commit to allocating time to brief recruiters, provide
feedback, meet with potential candidates and manage the offer process,
understanding that recruiting must take a top priority and be treated with the
same strategic approach and dedication as any other business project.
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Collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters is one of the most critical components of hiring
success. This working relationship and professional partnership is best established by defining roles
and responsibilities at the front of the process, and reinforcing, measuring and monitoring these
accountabilities throughout each stage of the hiring process.
It’s important for hiring managers and recruiters alike to recognize how the job market, and applicant
expectations, are changing, and how important it is for the way you communicate with candidates to
follow suit. Job roles are becoming increasingly ambiguous and amorphous, which is why it’s
essential to invest more time at the front end of the process for establishing a short list of basic and
preferred criteria that’s clear to both sides and comprehensive enough to create a sourcing strategy
around.
While recruiters are often the ones who get the bad rap for bad candidate experience, particularly the
feedback “black hole” where no news is old news, but the fact of the matter is the hiring manager
often doesn’t provide any feedback for them to provide applicants in the first place. This
communications breakdown can be easily solved – and the candidate experience easily improved – by
formally agreeing to an established process and timetable for which the entire hiring team must
adhere when it comes to providing timely feedback and hiring decisions.
What Applicants Think of Hiring
You’ve probably noticed by now that there seem to be certain themes that continually recur between
every key stakeholder in the hiring process – there’s not a tremendous amount of difference between
what hiring managers and recruiters think, even if they arrive at those same ends through drastically
different means.
Of course, when it comes down to actually making a hire, the opinion that matters the most – and the
voice that’s the most essential for recruiters and hiring managers alike to listen to and take into
account, is that of the applicant. Because without them, there wouldn’t be hiring managers or
recruiters, anyway – and filling a req without applicants or candidates would prove to be a daunting
challenge for any employer, no matter how strong their brand might be.
Sure, it’s easy to pass the baton of blame internally, and the reasons hiring doesn’t work at an
organizations are as varied as the hiring stakeholders who can’t seem to come to any sort of
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consensus other than a tacit acknowledgement that whatever they’re doing isn’t exactly working as
expected.
But from the outside looking in, none of that really matters to the applicants who continue to be
frustrated by poor experiences with employers, and the bad blood that builds can be far more
detrimental to a brand than the specious squabbles between the hiring managers and recruiters too
busy blaming each other to focus on the most important stakeholder in the process.
The importance of candidate experience has been well documented, a highly visible talent topic that’s
been covered by every blogger and vendor in the recruiting industry, not least by the annual
Candidate Experience Award report, which breaks down the impact of the relationships between
recruiters, hiring managers and the candidates each encounters during the hiring process.
As the report and the research in assembling this particular paper both suggest, in an age of
recruitment automation, personalization is the key to improving candidate experience, with high
touch beating high tech every day of the week. At least, that’s what the applicants we asked about the
hiring process had to say:
“I prefer to speak to the person I will be working for because the recruiters do not
really know what the jobs are all about. This is often not possible.”
“My big issue is feedback. You rarely hear anything unless they want you to come
back. When I put time in to applying or coming for interview then I should hear
back.”
“The last couple of interviews I had were very different at interview to how the
recruiter explained the job to me. This wastes a lot of time.”
“Recruiters are all over you when they are trying to get you to send you a resume
or apply, then it’s complete radio silence. I always try to get around this by
applying directly to the head of department or talking to someone in the team.”
“I’m not really looking for a job so I need plenty of information before I’m willing
to consider something. Recruiters can rarely give me the information I need.”
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“My experience is that managers rarely know how to interview, and often seem
rushed or not interested after I have made the effort. I feel like the recruiters are
on my side, but the managers see things as a bit of an inconvenience.”
Listening to the applicants themselves, it’s readily apparent that much of their frustration comes from
investing a significant amount of time into researching, applying and even interviewing for jobs, only
to hear minimal feedback, although in most cases, candidates likely hear nothing at all save perhaps
some form letter or automated e-mail.
This obvious inequality is only exacerbated by the fact that recruiters rarely set expectations or clearly
communicate timelines, leaving candidates mostly at the mercy of a mostly broken hiring process.
But the more we look at what everyone wants and needs out of that hiring process, it becomes clear
that these are largely universal and consistent drivers for candidates, hiring managers and recruiters
alike.
Everyone wants a realistic overview of the job, a clear understanding of the role and
responsibilities, consistent communication, meaningful feedback and as quick and
painless a process as possible. Period.
It became quite clear from the conversations we had with applicants that they want more than just a
template job description or some corporate copy on a careers site before deciding to actually apply for
a role; instead, they wanted insight and access into the people responsible for overseeing the hiring
process, but reported that they had no desire to communicate or engage with recruiters over anything
unrelated to the process of becoming an employee or receiving feedback or status on an outstanding
application.
More than being able to connect with hiring stakeholders, the applicants we spoke to reported that
they’d rather connect and engage with their potential colleagues and coworkers, particularly possible
teammates or hiring managers, not to get some sort of inside track but instead figure out whether or
not a position was worth even applying to or not, often using these conversations to voluntarily opt
out of the process.
These informal inquiries are becoming more common, and add a new layer of responsibility on the
hiring manager and his team when it comes to recruiting. This is something that every talent
acquisition department should coordinate, support and manage, turning these cold inquiries into
warm candidates by taking the lead in anticipating to and responding to these self-screens.
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Many organizations do a great job with this by utilizing features like live chat, video content, blogging
and social media marketing to show the real people and tell the real stories behind careers at that
company. Job descriptions have evolved from static, one dimensional documents into dynamic,
socially integrated and search optimized integrated marketing campaigns which attract and engage
applicants across the multitude of career and content related channels out there.
No matter what platform your talent team is targeting, make sure these job descriptions and
associated employer brand collateral provide passive candidates and active applicants alike enough
insight and information into your organization to determine whether or not they should bother
applying or trying to connect with a recruiter. Having the wrong candidates self-select out is just as
important as reeling the right ones in.
With the applicant’s point of view in mind, here are three ways candidates think that hiring managers
and recruiters alike could improve the hiring process and make recruiting a little less painful:
1) Establishing clearly deﬁned expectations and providing every applicant with a
service level agreement so that they know what process to expect, and when to
expect it, for every position posted.
2) Establishing hiring and selection processes with fair, clear criteria that’s
consistently applied while also providing candidates with value added resources,
like interviewing tips or insights about company culture, and help empower
them to become stronger candidates.
3) Ditching the boilerplates and bullet points and turning job descriptions into
compelling content. Place an emphasis on communicating with candidates, and
step up content creation from the hiring team as well as increasing opportunities
for potential applicants to engage with the hiring stakeholders and potential
future coworkers and colleagues.
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The Hiring Process: Who Owns What?
Who has ultimate ownership for the hiring process within an organization is pretty much the million
dollar question of talent acquisition. After speaking with dozens of recruiters and hundreds of job
seekers and hiring manager, we’ve come to the conclusion that the recruiting process is owned
by talent acquisition team members acting as project managers, with responsibility for:
1) Creating a service level agreement and coordinating a hiring plan and strategy
with the hiring manager at the start of the recruiting process. Make sure to
include the people, tasks, resources and timeline required for a successful
search, and be as explicit as possible when including these variables in any SLA.
2) Creating a custom job description, having the hiring manager approve and
review this description prior to posting; create a list of minimum requirements,
identify potential sources of hire or sourcing strategies and create the content
necessary to support these campaigns.
3) Sourcing applicants, prequalifying all candidates and submitting write ups and
recommendations of those screens prior to a hiring manager interview; oversee
technology and tools like video recruiting and ensure these are being
appropriately leveraged by candidates and the hiring team.
4) Support hiring managers as needed; if you identify an area of potential
improvement, be proactive in providing training. Remember: they might be
responsible for the outcome of the process, but their success is incumbent on
your support.
5) Measuring, reporting and monitoring hiring manager performance against the
mutually agreed KPIs deﬁned in the SLA and against associated business
benchmarks.
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6) Manage the disposition process, and only submit viable candidates who you’ve
talked to and can justify why they’re a good ﬁt for the job prior to submitting
them to a hiring manager for consideration.
7) Debrieﬁng with the hiring manager and new hire after onboarding and a
successful conclusion to a search.
The hiring manager, as mentioned, ultimately owns the outcome of the hiring process. This means
that they’re also ultimately responsible for:
1) Reviewing, agreeing to and committing to delivering on the terms outlined in the
initial SLA.
2) Providing timely and meaningful feedback to both the talent acquisition team
and all candidates presented, whether or not they’re the candidate who’s
ultimately selected. They’ve put in time to interview for your role, and deserve a
little bit of yours in return.
The hiring manager owns the outcome and takes responsibility for:
1) Agreeing and committing to work to the SLA.
2) Providing timely and meaningful feedback to the talent acquisition team and
applicants in the process beyond presentation.
3) The hiring manager is responsible for interviewing, selecting and presenting an
offer to a candidate – the recruiter more or less hands off hiring responsibility
when the manager agrees to see a slate of candidates a recruiter has submitted,
turning to talent acquisition for support as needed 
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Our Conclusion
Collaboration and communication between hiring managers and the talent acquisition team are
critical to hiring success. These outcomes are only achieved when accountability and responsibility is
shared between recruiters and hiring managers, and work is distributed so that talent acquisition
owns and manages the process, provides training and support for hiring managers and effectively
establish the parameters and KPIs associated with a search through the implementation of an SLA at
the beginning of the process.
Talent acquisition today requires recruiters take a project management approach to hiring, providing
support, organization, infrastructure and backend operations to the stakeholders ultimately
responsible for driving the hiring process. Organizations who have adopted this approach, such as the
employers already outlined in this paper, have seen significant success, with improvements in both
hiring performance and stakeholder satisfaction.
Every stakeholder has very similar needs, and while it’s easy to concentrate on technology and tools
as the silver bullet for hiring success, but the truth is that even incremental improvements require a
much more human touch. This is good news for any organization, because this means that you don’t
have to be Google or Facebook to adopt a cutting edge, inclusive and effective hiring process that
attracts the best talent to your organization.
We’ve talked to a lot of these stakeholders, and they agree: in the business of recruiting, it really all
comes down to people – no matter what process or product your organization happens to be using.
- Bill 
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About the Author
Bill Boorman is a lead advisor to Take the Interview and other innovative technology companies. He
has been based in and around recruiting for the past 35 years. He currently divides his time between
advising tech startups, hosting #Tru (the recruiting unconference) events across the globe and
implementing hiring strategy at global organizations such as Oracle, Hard Rock Cafe, Naspers, KPMG
and the BBC. Known as “the one in the hat”, he is a regular speaker at conferences around the world.
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The Hiring Manager Conundrum: Whose Job Is It Anyway

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