The Challenging Job of Recruiting for a Demanding Hiring Manager

In this day and age, I find it hard to believe that recruiters are still handling hiring managers who demand (strong word but often realistic) five viable candidates per week. We all know that an edict to find five new candidates weekly can be somewhat of a joke, but it’s all in the way you interpret “candidate” and “find.”

At the risk of getting a little passive-aggressive-y, here’s my best advice to those recruiters. If any hiring managers stumble upon this, it’s a good message for you too.

• Try your darndest to find those five candidates. Of course you can do it. Maybe. We are (mostly) cut from the same highly service-oriented, customer-centric, people-pleasing cloth. You spend the time and pull out all the stops making the job posting just right to nab active candidates securing every keyword and synonym you can think of. You passively hunt using every tool and trick at your disposal. And you absorb this extra pressure with a smile on your face while you juggle your other requisitions, interviews, updates, and scheduling tasks, knowing when to stop - hopefully - so you never get to the point of hating your job. Whew. The market trends and demographics are against you, yes, but perhaps you have a brand name with cache and a stellar reputation.
• Hunt inside their pool of connections on LinkedIn. This should be interesting! What type of hiring manager are you working with? Let's paint the ideal picture. It’s someone who has taken their LinkedIn profile seriously over the years and built up thousands of connections with people in their functional area of expertise and across the various industry sectors they have worked. There is no better place to hunt for candidates they will like than within their own pool of contacts. Here’s the part where you get them involved similar to #3 below, but this one is an even easier ask. Since they already know the person in some fashion, this is now a message between contacts - easy! Provide some guidance with words for them to use, “Jenny how are you doing?! I see you are now with XYZ. Do you still focus on ABC? I ask because I am hiring over here at DEF and you popped to mind as someone I would love to work with again. Can I buy you a coffee?/Would you like to learn more?/Can we set up a short call so I can tell you more about it?” The hiring manager's partnership and advocacy is essential here. Reverse the SLA they put upon you. Pinpoint the likely prospects within their network and ask them to do at least 10 of these outreaches per week with follow ups the following week.
• While we are on the topic of LinkedIn, this is a must-do for always: have them post the link. This is especially critical for the quota-setting hiring manager who needs to know their involvement is critical to the success of the hunt. Give them the job link and schedule it for them if needed. Get them to post onto their page every other week with a variety of sales messages. Remind them that your job is to sell THEM as a hiring manager, leader, and mentor. Make sure they are ready to put the job out to their own network and ask their entire team to do the same. This provides job seekers -- or those who are likely to share -- with a clear picture of the leader's passion and involvement, which greatly enhances the appeal of the open job. ?
• Supplement with top prospects. Share individuals who have stellar profiles who fit the job criteria well. Are they “candidates”? Well, I’d typically say no. They don’t have interest in speaking with us. Yet. Who has the best chance of turning their heads and getting their attention? The hiring manager, of course. So give them their assignment and write up the script for them. Provide a couple of ways that make sense for outreach depending on what you have - phone, email, InMail, a second-degree connection - and provide the content to woo. Bring them into your world and explain that your cold outreach as a recruiter gets a 20-30% response. Their outreach as the hiring manager is immediately perceived as warm resulting in double the response rate. Especially in some occupations where a hit from a recruiter is commonplace. It's way less commonplace to hear from the hiring manager.
• Desk-side calibration is my next point of advice when the going gets tough. Sitting side-by-side, or more realistically sharing a screen, source together. Ask them to verbally calibrate when looking at a resume or profile so you can hear the thought process. This gives you:

1. A better understanding of what appeals and does not appeal.
2. An opportunity to push back on unrealistic criteria or expectations.
3. A way to point out what can be taught once part of the organization vs. what’s really important to have coming in.
4. An opportunity to open up a market intelligence resource like Talent Insights or Talent Neuron, if you are fortunate enough to have access to such tools. Play with the criteria, geo location desires and show what the pool of talent looks like. It can be eye opening for a hiring manager to see the talent pool shrink before their eyes as you plug in the complexity of the open role along with their requirements. It can truly soften up the harshest of demanding hiring managers before your eyes.

Demanding hiring managers are not going to go away. That’s the nature of the beast. The key to managing them lies not just in meeting the arbitrary quota expectations they have of you, but in transforming the hiring event into a collaborative venture. The recruiter’s job is challenging no matter what! When you add these types of hiring managers, it becomes downright daunting. However, the challenging personalities soften up when you employ these strategic approaches designed to not only meet these expectations but also foster a new level of collaboration with hiring managers.