Having effective hiring managers is crucial for businesses looking to hire and develop the talent they need. For nearly 90% of job seekers, it is the impression they get of the person they will be working for that most influences their decision on whether to join. At the same time, one of the critical factors causing early employee attrition is a lack of faith in their manager.
Talent Watch is an ongoing series of research-based reports created my myself and Mervyn Dinnen that analyse and reflect the way the talent lifecycle is evolving, from attention to retention and beyond. In this special bonus episode of the podcast, we discuss some of the key findings from our recently published Talent Watch report on Hiring Manager Relations.
You can download your free copy of the report here.
A huge thank you to Attrax for sponsoring this edition of Talent Watch.
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:12]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder and welcome to the very first Talent Watch edition of the Recruiting Future podcast. Now these are going to be regular bonus podcasts dedicated to Talent Watch. Now I’m sure many of you are asking yourselves, What’s Talent Watch? TalentWatch is a collaborative series of research based reports that I’ve been producing with my good friend and colleague Mervyn Dinnen. And we’re looking at analyzing and reflecting on the way that the talent lifecycle’s evolving from attention to retention and beyond. So each report is created using minor Mervyn’s content with influence methodology which incorporates a mix of of qualitative and quantitative research with our analysis and commentary. This is the first edition. I’m going to introduce Mervyn, he’s going to tell us a little bit more about the subject for this first Talent Watch. But before I do, I just want to say a really big thank you to attracts who’ve sponsored this first report. If you’ve not come across attrax before, they are the industry leading career site system. They help you convert your career site visitors into high quality job applications. Powered by the latest AI, Attrax delivers outstanding talent experience and a strong conversion of candidates into the ats. So I strongly suggest you check out their website at www.attracts.co.uk and attracts is spelled a double T R A X. So without further ado, let’s talk about this first edition of Talent Watch. Mervyn, are you there?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:57]:
I am here. Hello Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
I’m very good. Always a pleasure to talk to you and always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. So tell everyone about this first issue of tal, what we looked at for the report and why we chose to do it.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:02:10]:
Thank you, Matt. For the first edition. I think we started with a topic which is at the heart, I suppose, of recruitment since time began, which is the hiring manager. If I think back to my early days as a recruitment consultant, it was always the hiring manager trying to get through to the hiring manager, trying to get decent feedback from the hiring manager. Candidates always complaining about their interview, not dropping out because they felt that the person who interviewed them, who they’d be working for, possibly wasn’t the kind of person they wanted to report to. And it still persists to this day. I mean, you and I have both been at recruitment conferences. We’ve seen sessions about how to kind of improve your hiring manager. We’ve done some recent research. A couple of years ago, we researched 14,000 job seekers and all of the reasons that they drop out of recruitment processes and hiring processes are linked back to the hiring manager. We did something late last year where we found that 90% of talent acquisition teams said that it was vital to them that the recruitment experience represented the employee experience, but only 17% felt they achieved it. And if you dig deeper, it’s because most of them believe that the hiring managers don’t fully represent employer brand EVP and things like that. So what we want to do is to really get to the root of the problem, try to understand what drives it and look at ways in which it can be improved.
Matt Alder [00:03:43]:
Absolutely. And it was a really interesting piece of work to do. As I mentioned in the introduction, we do this kind of work with a mix of quantitative research and qualitative research. I find it very difficult to say those words. So we spoke directly to a number of TA leaders about their, their experience in this area, some of the challenges they face with relations with the hiring managers and their teams, and also some of the fantastic things that they’re doing to solve those challenges. And we also, and we also put out a survey to the TA community. And I know that it’s something that I flagged up on the main podcast and many of you filled it in, so thank you, thank you very much for doing that. So the report is free to download and we’ll give you the link at the end of this little mini show. And as Mervyn was saying, this is really looking into the problem. And the way we structure the Talent Watch reports is we really sort of dig into the, the problem and, and look for some key findings. We then kind of use the research to explore the reality of what’s really going on and then we’ll finish by, by looking at some best practice and identifying something, some of the things that TA leaders are doing to deal with the challenges. So in this case, it was very clear from, from the research that, that hiring manager relations is a challenge for, for many, many, many, many employers and many, many TA teams. And in the problem section of our report, we’ve highlighted six key areas. Now, not going to go into all of them because we want you to download the report and read it and look at the research, but we’re just going to pick out the ones that really stood out for us. And the finding out of the six key findings that stood out for me was the, the lack of hiring manager input into recruitment process design and choice in recruiting technology. In fact, we found that 26 talent acquisition professionals who filled in the survey indicated that their hiring managers had no direct input into choice of recruiting technology. And when we sort of looked at some of the solutions, it was really clear that companies who were involving hiring managers in recruitment process design and recruitment technology choices were really overcoming this problem and building some really, really strong relationships that were really kind of aiding recruiting within their organization. So as an example, a few months ago on the podcast, I spoke to James Edwards, the digital attraction manager at Mitchells and Butler, and when they were putting in their new ATS, they treated their 1600 hiring managers as the proper end user of the software. So they made sure that the decision they made about the ATS they chose and how it was configured and how it was implemented was based on the needs of those hiring managers. And that to me, that’s how you get buy in and that’s how you develop really strong positive hiring manager relationships that move your process forward and help you achieve your objectives. What stood out for you? Merv?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:06:40]:
I think one of the important things that stood out for me was when I was looking at some of the things that talent acquisition teams were saying about their relationship with hiring managers, and some were saying that hiring managers just see us as order takers. They see us as providers of a person in a timely way. All they really want is a quick shortlist and rolling back from that. What became apparent is, of course, for a lot of hiring managers, hiring isn’t a constant behavior. It’s something they do from time to time. It’s something they do often in a time of stress. Someone’s left their team, someone’s left the department, there’s no internal replacement. They need to go outside and find somebody. Sometimes they’re looking to add an extra person, it’s taking a long time, they can’t find the person they want, the pressure’s on, the workloads increasing. So normally when they’re looking to hire, it’s at times when they’re doing a lot of other things, but they don’t have talent acquisitions. Overview of what the talent market is like, where there are skills shortages. They certainly don’t have a real insight into the ongoing attraction and marketing that talent acquisition does to keep a pipeline of candidates interested. And I think that for me was quite important because it’s on an isolated case by case basis. It’s easy for the TA team to think, oh, the hiring manager just doesn’t get this. And a lot of the time it’s because they think that they can just ask TA for a shortlist or for a couple of candidates to interview and there will be people in a pipeline already waiting.
Matt Alder [00:08:17]:
That was definitely a really interesting finding. Was there anything else that stood out for you?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:08:22]:
Yes, I think the other thing that surprised me was about how talent acquisition teams kind of measure, if you like, hiring manager efficiency and a number of different measurements were suggested. I won’t go through them all. I’ll leave you to download the report and read each one. I suppose the two observations I would make one is that no measure was used by more than 54% of respondents, so there clearly is a very wide range of measurements used. But quite a few of the more popular measures were either longer term ones or the areas where the hiring managers don’t have much input and control over. And I wondered if at the end of it there should be maybe some more consistency around that. And there are one or two recommendations for that which you can find in the report?
Matt Alder [00:09:17]:
Absolutely, there are a number of recommendations. We identify four ways that hiring manager effectiveness can be improved and these are things that are based on what TA leaders are actually doing in practice and are working well for them. You can download your free copy of the Talent Watch report by going to Bit ly HM Relations. That’s bit ly HM Relations and that’s all in lowercase. Mervyn, thank you very much for joining me.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:09:47]:
It’s been a pleasure. Matt, thank you very much for having me on to talk about our first report.
