How often have you experienced it when a hiring manager told you they needed a role filled yesterday? The expectation becomes all systems go, hit the ground running and we’ll have qualified candidates to speak to within days. Speed to hire is undoubtedly important – especially in the fast-paced environment of an early-stage company – but that speed needs to be balanced with quality. Being diligent and finding the right person is more important than getting a bum on a seat quickly, especially when we consider that the cost of a bad hire is up to 3x of that person’s salary. Gulp. This is where effective role calibration between recruiters and hiring managers comes in.
Having a considered approach to recruiter and hiring manager role calibration ensures both parties are aligned in their expectations, leading to more effective hiring processes and better outcomes for all involved.
Here, we delve into what effective role calibration looks like in reality and share some tactics to enhance this hugely important aspect of recruitment.
Common Challenges in Role Calibration
So let’s start by taking a look at some of the common challenges that arise when it comes to role calibration between recruiters and hiring managers.
Communication Gaps
One of the primary challenges faced in role calibration is communication gaps. Misinterpretation of the job requirements or expectations from a candidate can lead to significant disruptions in the hiring process.
Misaligned Expectations
When recruiters and hiring managers aren’t singing from the same hymn sheet regarding the qualifications, skills, and experience needed for somebody coming into the role in question, it leads to hugely misaligned expectations. This can result in disagreements about the profiles being presented, unnecessary back and forth, and time wasted, as well as a crappy candidate, stakeholder, AND recruiter experience.
Lack of Collaboration
Effective role calibration and alignment require collaboration. Recruiters should not be seen as order takers, but rather partners in finding the right person for the role in question. We spoke about this in depth here. It’s key that recruiters and hiring managers don’t operate in silos. Throughout the process, you’re a team and any lack of collaboration will hamper understanding and fulfillment of the hiring needs.
The Impact on Recruitment
Cumbersome, Hindered Hiring Processes
Poor role calibration can slow down hiring processes. Delays in decision-making, friction, multiple rounds of interviews, ineffective candidate evaluation, and back-and-forth communication contributes to lengthy recruitment timelines. Which nobody wants.
Poor Candidate Quality
When recruiters and hiring managers aren’t calibrated, the chances of finding and selecting the right candidate diminish. This misalignment often results in poor decisions being made based on incomplete information, frustration, hasty thought processes, or worse – biased perspectives.
Perception of TA Tarnished
When there’s poor calibration between recruiter and hiring manager, leading to the above frustrations, the perception of talent acquisition at the organisation risks being tarnished. Fundamental to driving great outcomes in recruitment is building a culture of trust and hiring success.
Tactics for Effective Role Calibration
Establish Clear Communication Channels
Creating open and transparent communication channels is fundamental to successful role calibration. Recruiters and hiring managers should maintain regular touchpoints to discuss expectations, challenges, and feedback when it comes to candidates and the hiring process.
Have a Set Communication Cadence
Scheduling a regular cadence of alignment meetings ensures ongoing communication and allows both recruiters and hiring managers to bring up and address any emerging issues in a timely way. These meetings should provide a platform to discuss progress on the role, share potential profiles, discuss any evolving needs and adjust the recruitment approach accordingly.
Build Trust and a Continuous Improvement Approach with Data
Establish a set of data points or key performance indicators (KPIs) to be shared and monitored between the recruiter and hiring manager. This will help to foster a unified approach and understanding of progress, ensuring both recruiter and hiring manager are working towards the same goals, and serve as a way to identify and drive optimisations in the recruitment process for the role.
Encouraging Open Feedback
Constructive feedback is absolutely vital when it comes to driving an effective relationship between recruiters and hiring managers. And this begins with a shared level of respect, understanding, and collaboration. Our article here looks specifically at building strong stakeholder relationships in recruitment. Both recruiters and hiring managers must feel comfortable providing feedback and input throughout the process – again, fostering continuous improvement.
Using Technology to Support Role Calibration
Get Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in Order
Using an ATS properly can massively streamline the recruitment process – not to mention keep you GDPR compliant. An ATS such as Ashby, Lever, or Greenhouse can provide a centralised platform for collaboration, logging feedback, and giving full visibility on the status of candidates in the process. This makes it much easier for recruiters and hiring managers to share information.
Integrate Communication Tools Where Needed
Incorporating nifty communication tools within your recruitment process facilitates synchronous and asynchronous interaction between recruiters and hiring managers. Platforms such as Slack are great for instant messaging, have video call functionalities and a powerful suite of integrations to streamline your communication.
Data-Driven Decision Making
If you know us here at Scede, you’ll know that data is at the core of everything we do. Harnessing it is essential for effective role calibration. You have to be able to conduct market mapping, review salary and benchmarking metrics, analyse hiring funnel numbers, and performance data, and more to make insight-informed decisions and adjustments in the hiring process.
Calibration Success Stories from Scede Talent Partners
Case Study: Vienna-HQs Crypto Unicorn
Through effective hiring manager and recruiter calibration, we filled 3 critical positions in 3 weeks for this Vienna-headquartered crypto Unicorn. The process started by deeply understanding what was in the existing job description, sourcing example profiles and then presenting these as well as a set of qualifying questions back to the hiring manager. This enabled the Talent Partner to further calibrate their understanding of the role. As a result, a rewrite of the job description was advised, and the initial candidate screening conversation optimised. Hiring managers were very satisfied with the outcome as a result, and candidates gave glowing feedback on the process.
Case Study: AI Verification Category Leader
A business critical position at this AI scaleup had been open for 6 months and had been worked on by 3 different recruiters with no successful hire. This resulted in a loss of confidence from the hiring manager. Upon kicking off an Embedded Talent partnership with the company, one of our Talent Partners met with the hiring manager to establish a weekly communication cadence, set agreed data points for tracking progress and insights and aligned on role requirements, experience, preferred companies to target and what aspects of the search were “nice to haves”. Building trust between the Talent Partner and the hiring manager took proactive effort, however once in place, we were able to advise on candidate location and must-have requirements. A few minor changes resulted in a brilliant hire being made within 4 weeks and some ace feedback shared; “Scede were absolutely brilliant in terms of finding the right skill set for the right role ahead of time”.
Tips for Recruiters
Nail the Initial Role Briefing Meeting
A comprehensive role briefing meeting between the recruiter and the hiring manager is not a nice to have, it’s a must. Recruiters should arrive prepared for this with a deep understanding of the job description, potential sourcing methods, example candidate profiles, and a list of ideal target companies. This is a chance to align and calibrate on the exact requirements of the role and ensure full context is shared between the recruiter and hiring manager. Use this time to gauge hard and soft requirements, budget for salary, team culture and context, as well as other facts that can help you build a candidate value proposition.
It’s important during the initial role qualification or intake meeting to identify hard and soft requirements for the role. Especially in Tech. For example, a requirement might highlight C# but the reality is that they need anyone with object-orientated experience, opening the talent pool up to those with skills in other languages such as Java. Different Engineering leaders have different preferences when building teams – some look for an exact technical match, others are language agnostic. Being aligned on this from the get-go is a gamechanger.
Research and Market Mapping
Recruiters should conduct thorough research on the role in question and go through a market mapping exercise before the initial role briefing meeting so that they can bring valuable context and insights to the table. This approach facilitates a more informed discussion on any potential challenges, helps to set expectations, drives two-way communication, and builds trust.
Facilitate Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication
Recruiters should establish the communication cadence early on, and manage expectations in terms of feedback loops, and channels that can be utilised to optimise the process throughout.
Know That Calibration Is Continuous
Calibration isn’t a one-time task, it’s continuous. Calibration sessions following the initial role intake can be held in many ways such as candidate profile review sessions, shadowing of recruiter screening calls, sourcing sessions with the hiring community, enhanced debrief meetings, or later-stage interview shadowing. This will allow you to highlight any misalignment or challenges quickly, identify solutions and implement them promptly as you go.
To Close
Ensuring calibration between the recruiter and the hiring manager is the linchpin of successful hiring. By driving effective communication patterns, aligning expectations, deeply understanding the role requirements, and embracing tech where needed, recruiters and hiring managers can ensure a seamless and powerful hiring process.
At Scede, our customers depend on our experience in role calibration to find highly relevant talent for them the first time around – reducing their time to hire and minimising any hiring headaches they might be facing. As such, we dedicate time and focus at the start of any engagement – Embedded or Source – to ensure that we have a deep understanding of the companies we’re partnering with, the teams we’re hiring into, and the role we’re hiring for.
If you want to tap into this expertise, the frameworks we do this through, or the templates we use to drive excellence in role calibration, don’t hesitate to get in touch.