Do Your Hiring Managers Know How To Hire?

So the real question I want to ask, do your hiring managers actually know how to hire and screen candidates? 

I've been hiring and working with hiring teams for over 15 years and one of the things I come across time and time again, regardless of industry or years of hiring experience or how long someone has been a manager of people; there is an ASSUMPTION, THAT HIRING MANAGERS KNOW HOW TO SCREEN AND SELECT THE BEST CANDIDATES. 

In my experience, most hiring managers have never been formally taught more than a few simple things and most of them have been too busy to learn more.

A recruiters biggest headache, is when hiring managers don't know how to hire, they don't know how to screen candidates, they start a hiring process thinking they need one skill or aptitude to waste three to five months only to realize they need someone else entirely. 

And guess what? At the end of the day, do you know who is held responsible for how long it's taking to hire this role? Or responsible for the cost of hiring? Who is being looked at as though their performance is suffering in reality - the recruiter.

Its the equivalent of blaming a car for driving slow, when the driver isn't putting their feet on the gas. 

Or the equivalent of blaming a blind folded person, who has been recently spun, for not hitting the bulls eye, or even the board.

So this message is for Hiring teams. It's for hiring directors, it's for the head of people organizations. How are you holding your hiring managers accountable to actually working with recruiters and doing what they need to be doing to be an EDUCATED Hiring Manager?

 What do I mean by being an educated hiring manager? 

1. Do they know how to effectively screen  AND attract a candidate at the same time? 
2. Do they know how to get clear on who they need in each role? Can they do this effectively, or do new requirements come up in the middle of hiring?
3. Do they know the right people to have on their screening teams and how to ensure and hold those individuals accountable for screening those candidates to the requirements of the actual job and not any other ideas? 
4. Do they know how to get buy-in from the rest of the hiring decision makers to ensure everybody's on the same page as to what they're looking for? 

Undoubtedly, the internet is full of complaints about how companies hire. It's full of complaints about non-relevant questions, inappropriate questions, or questions that leave a candidate wondering, "Is this person for real?"

We hear countless stories of how candidates felt interrogated versus feeling seen, heard, understood, and known.

This begs the question, how can someone effectively hire WITHOUT an understanding of the person they are interviewing? 

We have countless stories of amazing high-performing candidates that would never want to work with certain hiring teams because of how they presented themselves.

As an experienced talent acquisition professional, having both internal and external hiring experience, what I have observed is that even the best people managers are guilty of some of the interview and screening practices that do not reflect their actual ability to manage. When focusing on screening candidates, hiring managers are not always at the same time, focused on ensuring the candidate has buy in to work for them personally.

How does this show up in an interview? 

• The hiring manager on their laptop during the Video Call or in Person interview
• The screening team is playing bad cop. Their faces give nothing away,... that includes WARMTH and HOSPITALITY. The interviewers are not directed in anyway to share WHY the candidate might want to work there.
• The hiring manager is so afraid of not hiring the SKILLED individual, that they stick almost exclusively to technical conversation. They don’t introduce themselves or explain their own background in order to put the candidate at ease so they can answer to the best of their ability. 

There are many examples, and I am sure recruiters and candidates across the world could add countless more.

The thing is, Hiring Managers don’t purposely decide to act this way. Most hiring managers I’ve worked with want to be known for being good at hiring and interviewing. Most of them deeply care about their team members and go to bat to do right by them. So how can we get them to the point where they are also able to share this aspect of themselves with the people they are interviewing?

We have to STOP expecting people who manage people to AUTOMATICALLY know how to do these things. They went to school and did training for so many other aspects of their role. Yet for hiring, outside of a few basic DOs and DONTs, most hiring managers aren't  taught how to interview and ask the right questions. 

We have to START providing TRAINING to new managers of people but ALSO to those who have years of managing experience who might find that old methods are no longer providing the results they once had.

We have to NORMALIZE treating recruiters and talent acquisition professionals as the Trusted Advisors and Hiring Experts most of them are. We need to invite them into our interviews and we need to ASK them for feedback on our own interviewing skills.

Each organization can bridge their hiring gaps by providing education to their hiring teams on these processes and by empowering their recruiters to stand in the gap as the Experts in hiring that they are.