Help Me Help You

Imagine This:

You are Jerry Maguire and your hiring manager is Rod Tidwell…

There are many different places a candidate might come from and fill one of your roles. There are internals, externals, sourced candidates, people recycled from the ATS, people recycled from the CRM, and referrals. When it comes to referrals, we often network directly with the team we are hiring for, our TA team members, or just people that we are close with at our company. But we don’t often go directly to the source: The Hiring Manager.

The Hiring Manager sets the requirements for the role. Does this person need a degree? Do they need to come from the same industry? How many years of overall experience do they need? We work heavily with Hiring Managers to make sure we are doing our best to find them top notch candidates for their roles. We do intake calls with them, build out the job description for them, send them a small batch of people, ask them for a benchmark resume or two. But we need to start asking them more often: Who do YOU know for this role?

If you look at this from the business side, the Hiring Manager is our client and we are working for them. Now, I don’t love it when things are put plainly this way. I like to feel like we are all on the same page and be treated that way. Maybe not in terms of seniority, but we work together and have the same goal: get people hired. Because we often feel that we need to tip-toe around things with the Hiring Manager, we don’t often push back on things or ask them for any additional assistance. I have had some HMs in the past tell me, “Why are you asking me to help you hire for this role. Isn’t that your job?” To which I would respond today with, “If you can make someone else’s job a little easier by just posting a role on your LinkedIn feed or plugging in a quick Boolean search, then why not?”

And here are the following ways on why and how to ask for assistance from an HM. Utilizing Their Network

A lot of the time, Hiring Managers to come from direct competitors. The reason they were originally reached out to join your company is because the Hiring Manager for their role wanted you to look for people from top competitors. Because of this, they are connected to a lot of great people from their previous companies. But they don’t often think about how strong their LinkedIn network might be. They might not have even logged into LinkedIn since they started their role at your company, but you should be pushing to get them to utilize that database.

Read the rest of the article over on the SourceCon website: https://www.sourcecon.com/help-me-help-you-you-are-jerry-maguire-and-your-hm-is-rod-tidwell/