Influencing Hiring Managers

 

“How do we get our hiring managers’ to follow a consistent process and care more about candidate experience?”  This summarizes a question posed to me yesterday by a Staffing Director whose COO has been hearing too many stories like “the candidate waited alone in the cafeteria for two hours because the next interviewer on the schedule didn’t show.”  Combine that experience with interview schedules of 17 interviewers over multiple weeks and you can understand the concern.

Unfortunately, most companies have similar challenges.  Here are some things that have worked for me in the past at Cadence and Cisco:

1. Get executive level awareness of the problem and their commitment to help enforce change.  Sharing a handful of stories like above will help. 
2. Gather data, at a minimum for each hiring manager: # days between when a candidate is contacted for first interview and offer, # interviews a candidate goes through before receiving an offer, candidate satisfaction survey data about their interview experience (especially for candidates that weren’t hired).  This may need to be a manual process depending on your recruitment technology.  If so, even doing it for a 60 day period will provide enormous momentum for change.
3. Have recruiters rate their hiring manager’s performance on three things: responsiveness to submitted candidates, effectiveness of managing interview team, offer decision decisiveness.  A simple weekly rating of “green, yellow, red” for each of those areas works best. 
4. Report the above data to each hiring manger on a weekly basis and to the executives on a monthly basis.  Use both a carrot and a stick.  Hiring managers will quickly strive for better performance if you offer prizes for best scores (carrot) and when they know their management is watching (stick).

If you have any questions about making this work, feel free to contact me at jbloch@hire.com or 770-575-0770.