Recruiter & hiring manager: how to find a compromise?

Often, the recruiters we ask for expertise tell us about certain difficulties in interacting with hiring managers during the hiring process. How to build this collaboration while avoiding risks and wrong decisions? Here are the observations and recommendations of Svitlana Maiboroda, Group Team Leader at Smart Solutions.

The effectiveness of recruitment largely depends on mutual understanding and effective communication between the recruiter and the hiring manager. If the company’s staff turnover is low, and the hiring manager does not often conduct interviews and does not always understand the current state of the labour market, the recruiter will be a source of information and an assistant during the entire process.

Where to start?

The process itself should begin with a discussion of the role, functionality, and job description – together with the hiring manager. It will be logical to assess the potential of your own employees who could take on the new role at the start. After all, their adaptation to a new role is faster than that of an external specialist. In particular, you already have an understanding of their strengths and skills that need additional development, which generally reduces risks.

Also, at the beginning of the search, it is worth thinking about companies that can be donors of candidates with the right experience. As a rule, a hiring manager can expand this list on his or her part.

How not to fall into the trap of an ‘always open’ vacancy

If the manager decides to start looking for a candidate outside the company, a well-written job description will help to start the recruitment process in the right direction. However, if there are no specifics, the role description is too general, there is a risk that the vacancy will become ‘forever open’. Therefore, a recruiter can provide his or her own recommendations on the profile of the right candidate.

A recruiter is not an assistant, but a partner

It is important that the recruiter acts as a partner, not an assistant and organiser of meetings with candidates. Both the recruiter and the hiring manager should prepare for the interview.

Even if the employer has a well-known and positive brand, meeting the hiring manager as a potential boss is crucial, and the candidate will make a decision based on it.

If the manager doesn’t even have the candidate’s CV in front of him during the interview, confuses the candidate’s name, doesn’t understand his achievements, suggests starting the conversation with a recounting of all previous experience, or passively reacts to the candidate’s presentation of his skills, then this will probably be the last meeting.

False beliefs

Sometimes managers are under the mistaken impression that everyone should want to work for their company, that there are plenty of candidates on the market and that there is someone better than the ones they have already considered. This situation arises to a certain extent because not enough time has passed for the hiring manager, especially from a large international company that is used to easily ‎hunting candidates with attractive terms and conditions, to be able to assess the lack of staff and their unwillingness to change their relatively stable current positions. And if the first candidate is the right one, it is a great success, not a poorly developed market and the illusion that the ‘perfect’ candidate is still out there.

There are cases when a candidate is rejected not even because of the lack or inconsistency of their skills with the requirements of the vacancy, but because of arguments such as ‘the candidate has a low emotional background’, ‘they are not a patriot because they went abroad and have no clear plans to return’. This is not to mention the fact that ‘the chemistry didn’t work out’, ‘they didn’t match on the vibe’, ‘their eyes don’t burn’, etc.

Situation and challenges today

The labour market has undergone significant changes since the start of the war and they are still ongoing.

• Candidates continue to complain that they are tired of job hunting and endless tests that lead to nothing.
• Employers are experiencing a shortage of candidates and are nervous about the long vacancy closure.
• The candidate database developed by recruiters is often not up-to-date because many have moved abroad.

If employers are already accustomed to the hybrid format, then most of them are not ready to offer them fully remote cooperation, even if the work can be set up remotely and performed efficiently. Therefore, the list of candidates with whom you can contact and offer vacancies has shrunk significantly. And these trends are continuing.

There are cases when a vacancy is open for 3-6 months or even a year. Work is distributed among current employees, which leads to overtime, burnout and even dismissal.

There are more and more cases of career switching. And we’re not talking about moving to IT, but, for example, moving from a copywriting position to the production sector. This is also worth considering.

What’s next?

The market trend is that the shortage of candidates will increase. As of May-June 2024, there was an abnormal trend in the Ukrainian market when the ratio of vacancies to resumes on job sites reached a critical 1:1. Although the number of resumes has always prevailed there before; before the war, it was about 2 resumes per vacancy. With the outbreak of the war, of course, the number of vacancies dropped significantly, and it reached 11 CVs per vacancy.

The struggle for staff will intensify. Businesses experiencing staff shortages are now expanding the functionality of their current employees and looking for opportunities to increase salaries to retain specialists.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for recruiters to fill vacancies regardless of the level of the role. Therefore, one of their main tasks is to timely signal and communicate information to the business about the state of the candidate market to avoid inflated expectations and prejudices.

Flexibility and compromises

Even if a candidate does not meet the requirements, but is ready to learn and is interested in cooperation, motivated to work for a particular company, it is logical to invest some time in training him or her and already have an employee rather than continue to search for the ‘ideal’.

Flexibility in recruitment and search for compromise solutions, the willingness of the hiring manager to take under his wing a candidate with less experience or one who is interested in changing careers, readiness to hire older candidates and veterans, and the assistance and more active involvement of hiring managers in the onboarding of new employees are trends of our time.

There are cases when, after a long search, a manager is finally ready to return to a candidate who has already been rejected. But the candidate is not always ready to continue. Therefore, it is worth weighing the reasons for rejecting candidates at the start and staying in touch with them in case the search conditions change, or taking more time for feedback to be able to consider a sufficient pool of applicants.

Why it is important to balance

It is important for a recruiter to balance between the hiring manager and the candidates, to receive and provide feedback in a timely manner, to help move the process forward, and to adjust the request as needed. On the one hand, to be a candidate’s advocate, on the other hand, not to cause staff turnover by initiating the hiring of unsuitable or ‘toxic’ candidates, which can lead to the loss of current team members.

Sometimes the soft skills, i.e. soft skills that are difficult to acquire or change (unlike hard skills), become decisive.

Now the ball is in the candidate’s court: he or she chooses and often accepts offers with a checker from the current employer, if any. Therefore, the issue of team retention is probably the most important of all HR processes today.

What will help both recruiters and hiring managers

• Business readiness for change and flexibility, remote collaboration and the creation of an inclusive environment, the involvement of hiring managers in the adaptation and training of new employees, and the hiring of overqualified and senior staff will help to cover the shortage of staff.
• Personal questions at interviews that are not related to professional activities should become a thing of the past; they will definitely scare off a candidate.
• The recruitment process should be clear and transparent, with clear terms. The candidate forms his or her impression of the company from the moment of the first contact with the recruiter, so the format of communication and timely feedback are important. By the way, a request in Russian or a job description in Russian has long been unacceptable language (the same applies to candidates who send their CVs in Russian).
• Employers (including recruiters and hiring managers) should think twice before rejecting a candidate, re-evaluate the criticality of the reasons for rejection, and keep warm contact with the candidate in case other vacancies are opened in the company.

These are all simple steps that will protect you from making wrong decisions and lay the groundwork for future cooperation.