Monday, July 28, 2008

Hiring Manager! Use your recruiter wisely.

If you are like most hiring managers, you view your recruiter as a source of resumes and interviews. If you want to maximize your recruiter’s effectiveness, you need to help her manage her talent pipeline, and take advantage of her market insights and knowledge of candidates.

The most important thing you can do to help your recruiter bring you great talent is to make clear decisions, communicate them, and take action. Unwillingness to say no to good, but not great, a candidate is the primary mistake that hiring managers make. If you put candidates on hold, you block your pipeline and your recruiter becomes frustrated that you aren’t pulling the trigger on anyone. Or else, he becomes complacent, figuring that you will hire someone, while he moves on to more urgent projects.

As a hiring manager you are very bus, and sometimes focus on your own projects, sometimes to the detriment of your recruiting efforts. In order to help manage the process during a prolonged hiring initiative, you should consider appointing a person specifically to this task. I devoted an article to the discussion of this new position, “The Candidate Advocate.”

Once you have your pipeline under control, you are free to gather the knowledge and insights that your recruiter has to offer.


Next Entry: How a candidate should use a recruiter


Contact Jason Sanders

No comments:

Post a Comment