Recruitment has changed considerably over the past few years. The task of a recruiter is less that of an administrator handling a flood of applicant data, and more that of a marketer. As competition for top talent increases, recruiters have to be able to sell candidates on a role and an employer, not the other way around.

Hiring managers can be a recruiter’s greatest asset or their biggest obstacle. Good hiring managers work to streamline processes, deliver meaningful insights into what makes a desirable candidate, and stay in constant communication with their recruiters. 

Hiring managers who are non-supportive, don’t deliver key information about an open role and its responsibilities, and go AWOL when candidates start hitting the interview stage can render all of a recruiter’s hard work meaningless as candidates self-select out of the process.

Here’s how hiring managers can help empower and motivate their recruiters in the year ahead.

1. Make Priorities Crystal Clear

Ensure that your recruiters know what their top priority is. Speed of hire is often a critical goal of recruitment, but don’t forget to impress the need for matching Quality of Hire. It’s worthwhile to educate your recruiters on what makes a great candidate for your team. 

Recruiters aren’t clueless about this metric. In fact, Quality of Hire has been listed as a top priority of recruiters over the past year, yet many recruiters say they find this requirement difficult to quantify. Nearly a quarter (24% of recruiters) said that their biggest challenge was finding that critical alignment between actual candidate requirements and the hiring manager’s demands. 

Ensure your recruiters are 100% clear on:

• What you’re looking for in a candidate
• Which requirements are “must-have” and which are “like to have”
• How tight of a timeline you are working on
• What tools you are providing to make their job easier

Also give your recruiter a briefing on your DEIB goals, to ensure they keep diversity in mind when attracting candidates.

2. Recognize the Recruiter's POV

Hiring managers make a lot of demands on recruiters, from speed of hire to Quality of Hire and beyond. Without appropriate tools and processes, recruiters can feel hobbled and unable to meet expectations. This can lead to communication breakdown between recruiters and hiring managers, bad candidate experiences, and high new-hire turnover.

Recruiters do understand that making a costly bad hire is often more problematic than taking a while to make the right choice, but in a competitive marketplace, top talent won’t wait. You can’t just give orders: you need to ensure recruiters have what they need when they dive into the talent pool to secure the best candidates on your behalf.

When you partner with your recruiters instead of simply assigning them postings to fill, the entire hiring funnel becomes more productive and candidate experience improves exponentially. You’ll also have better luck with keeping recruiters on your side instead of going to work for the competition.

3. Provide Useful Tools

Use Crosschq 360 to turn traditional, time-consuming reference checking into a fast, digital process that makes it easy to compare apples to apples in the candidate pool. This single change can cut the time it takes to check references by up to 95%.

Overlay your ATS with TalentWall™ by Crosschq to provide a birds-eye view of the entire talent pipeline, as well as in-depth data on each candidate. Both hiring managers and recruiters can see how many candidates are in each stage and time in stage for each candidate, and enjoy bi-directional updates. This makes it easier to drive accountability and reduces administrative work, which 63% of recruiters say is their worst nightmare.  

Implement a tool that helps with interview scheduling (a common bottleneck for recruiters, who get stuck trying to hold on to a candidate long enough to get them in a room with the hiring manager.) This can prevent candidate drop-off after the bulk of the recruiting work has already been done.

Also, provide ways for recruiters to connect easily with candidates on a regular basis such as alerts that let them know if a candidate has gone more than three days without contact. Candidates who receive regular, informative communication about their application status are 3.5 times more likely to apply to other open positions at the same company.

Are you ready to find out just how much more productive and effective empowered recruiters can be? Contact us for a free demo today.