Many talent acquisition leaders have run into challenges when it comes to getting hiring managers to feel good about participating in recruiting events. There are a variety of reasons for this that can vary from one organization to the next or even change depending on the time of year and other demands on your hiring managers. Whatever the reason, working proactively to set your hiring managers up for success is one way to improve the outcomes of your recruiting events as well as your overall hiring process.
Creating a Better Hiring Manager Experience
In this article, we’ll explore:
- The importance of setting clear expectations
- How to prepare hiring managers for recruiting events (beyond training)
- How to empower hiring managers to see results
Tips for a Great Hiring Manager Experience
Oftentimes, TA teams take for granted that everyone knows what goes into delivering a great candidate experience—and great hiring outcomes. But, for managers, hiring is just one part of their job, and many new managers may have little or no experience with the entire recruitment process. The best way for TA teams to support hiring managers is by being proactive, transparent, and available to help with any questions along the way.
Here are the top ways to use Brazen to help your hiring managers feel more comfortable—and excited!—about participating in recruiting events.
Communicate clear expectations.
Explain to hiring managers what type of event they’re participating in and what will happen during their shift. This could mean explaining that they might be able to multitask while waiting between candidates, or what will happen when they get a rep handoff if you have other team members screening candidates during the same event.
Give them a checklist.
Don’t expect hiring managers to remember everything you tell or teach them. Provide easy-to-use resources they can refer to during recruiting events, like an interview process checklist that includes everything they need to do with each candidate, such as required questions to ask, rating the candidate, and entering notes in the virtual event platform.
Host screening-to-interview events all on one day.
Hiring managers are busy people and they don’t want to block out entire days to participate in a recruiting event. Speeding up the recruiting process makes the best use of everyone’s time—your hiring managers, your candidates, and your TA team. Hosting screening-to-hiring events in a consolidated time table is great for your TA team, and also great for hiring managers.
Let them know that this approach will mean spending less time going back and forth scheduling interviews and conducting one-off calls with individual candidates - a process that can span across multiple days or event weeks. Instead, they can block off a few hours of interview time, be ready and waiting to talk to candidates once they are screened, and complete a process that might take days or weeks to complete to fill a role - within a matter of hours.
(Many Brazen clients are successfully using this model to speed up the screening to interview to offer process from weeks to days.)
Conduct online interviews at scale.
Use pre-screening knockout questions and tap other HR staffers to help screen job seekers so you can narrow the talent pool for hiring managers. If your hiring managers only need to join in for events full of pre-qualified candidates, you’ll save them time and get them excited about how fast they might be able to get those offers out and start dates booked! Help them focus on all the amazing candidate conversations they'll be able to have in such a short period of time.
Take advantage of scheduled chats.
Scheduling hiring managers to meet with ideal candidates is a great way to make good use of their time. Make sure you teach them how to look at their scheduled chats so they can see what is coming up and how much time they have to fill in between. With scheduled chats, your recruiting team will be able to make sure that the top candidates who have pre-registered for any event are already booked with the hiring manager for that role. And hiring managers will know ahead of time which candidates they're booked with. When using scheduled chats, it's also a good idea to keep some time open on the hiring manager's schedule to accept chat transfers from those who recruiters screen at your hiring event. Communicating how this all works with your hiring managers ahead of time will help them see exactly how and why hiring events help speed up the screening and interviewing process, improving their experience as well.
Host a test event after your initial training.
Doing a dry run without candidates can help your hiring managers get comfortable with the platform and develop a better understanding of what a live recruiting event will be like. That experience can help reveal questions they didn’t think of before and gives you plenty of time to clear up any confusion well in advance of event day. Practice handing chats off to hiring managers so they're ready to provide a quality candidate experience on their end.
Set expectations for the event timeline and candidate flow.
Managing the expectations of hiring managers ahead of a screening and interviewing event is key. Remind hiring managers that many candidates join virtual events when it’s convenient for them (so not everyone will join all at once), and some of the best candidates are jumping on from their smartphones while on a break from their current job. By setting expectations about the event timeline and typical candidate flow, you'll set your hiring managers up for a great experience (and using scheduled chat can really help with this, too!)
Happy Hiring Managers Attract Better Candidates
If candidates join your recruiting event and have to talk to a hiring manager who doesn’t even want to be there—or who is overwhelmed and unable to devote their full attention—it doesn’t translate into a great candidate experience. On the flip side, if your hiring managers are comfortable and enthusiastic about the prospect of finding great potential candidates during your recruiting events, you get to tell a much different story. If you’re unsure about what your hiring managers need, don’t hesitate to ask them. And, whenever possible, work with their schedule and availability when planning recruiting events so you don’t inadvertently add stress that pollutes your candidate experience.
Ready to learn how you can hire more people for less with Brazen?
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- Creating an Award-Winning Candidate Experience
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Hiring Manager Experience: FAQs
What is Hiring Manager Experience?
Hiring manager experience (HMX) encompasses everything a hiring manager does across the hiring process, including their involvement in getting a job requisition created and approved, interviewing candidates, and the decision whether to hire a candidate or now. Hiring managers are critical to the recruiting process, however most of the time, they do not work on the recruiting team, they are a leader in the department who is hiring for a specific role. So, it's vital for recruiting teams to create a great hiring manager experience in order to create a great candidate experience. As many know, the rapport a candidate has with the hiring manager and team they will work with can be one of the most important factors in how they will assess a potential job offer. Thus, hiring manager experience and candidate experience are different, but interconnected.
