Putting the Onus on Us – An Assertive Approach to Working with a Recruiting Manager

Most of us have heard the phrase: “people don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad bosses.” This is undoubtedly true, but I believe this does not paint the entire picture of an organization.??

Early on in my career, I had many one-on-one meetings with my manager, team lead, or whoever I was reporting to at the time. Often, when my manager would ask me how I was doing, my answer would be some form of “everything is fine” or “I just need to work harder/be better” or “thankful for the opportunity and happy to be here!”

Behind these statements, however, I was struggling to learn the ropes and to be?a better recruiter. Perhaps I did not have the insight to articulate those struggles, or I may have just been too shy to speak up.?In any case, I did not address my lack of direction.

I wonder how much more control I would have had during these early years if I had simply asked for help when I needed it.

The generally accepted truism is that the success or failure of an organization is the responsibility of the leader. I would agree with that statement, but business success, much like life, is not so black and white.?

If we dig deeper, there are many more layers and nuances to success and failure, specifically within the staffing world.?

As a recruiter, throughout my career I have worked under many managers and leaders, many of whom had different styles and approaches. In hindsight, I can now see clearly that situations that may have looked like a misalignment in management style were, more than likely, the result of a passive approach on my end that led to stagnation.

I strongly believe and have personally seen that we, as individual recruiters, can take much more control in our own careers and thereby become better teammates, subordinates, and ultimately staffing experts by taking more ownership in our approach to working within an organization, specifically under leadership. To put it simply, by taking on leadership from a “bottom’s up” approach.?

Leading up the Chain of Command

In 2015, decorated NAVY SEAL leaders Jocko Willink and Leif Babin authored the book “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.” The book explores and gives examples of the tenants of leadership that apply beyond the military and are relevant to all organizations, teams, groups, or even families.

The book explores different principles of what it takes to lead a group, all centering on the core concept of “extreme ownership;” i.e., taking responsibility in every facet of one’s role, regardless of rank.

A core concept of the book that we can apply to recruiting is called: Leading Up the Chain of Command.?

Leif Babin states:

“Often, when people think of leadership, they think of a senior person leading a team of people that report to them. That’s leading down the chain of command. But just as important—or perhaps even more so—is leading up the chain of command. You must also lead those senior to you in the hierarchy of your organization. You have to understand their vision, align with that vision and push information up the chain, prioritizing the most important things they need to know. You have to influence them so that they make the best strategic decisions possible. You have to convince them so that they provide the training and resources you need to solve problems, accomplish your mission and win. You have to earn their trust.“

Let us discuss the concepts of aligning vision with our leaders. How can we influence them through our interactions (in team meetings and goals meetings) and earn trust through performance?

Aligning Vision

When I think of aligning visions, I picture the standard company mission statement: “we believe in matching talented individuals to serve our client’s needs...”.?

If you do a quick google search at major staffing companies, you will see a variation of the above.

Unfortunately, as purpose-driven as these mission statements are, it is easy to become desensitized to them in the day-to-day grind that is recruiting. These statements are so broad that the further down the chain of command that we go, the statement becomes more and more elusive and distant, and at a certain point loses its original power to change, motivate, and influence those who are doing the work on the ground level. This would directly apply to the recruiters searching for candidates as well as business development representatives searching for clients and new roles.?

At a certain point, a good manager or leader will convey the vision to his or her employees in a way that is tangible and relevant to day-to-day duties and express how it fits into the organization’s success. However, I believe that we, as individual recruiters, owe it to ourselves, manager, and company to offload some of this responsibility to ourselves and show through our questions and actions that we understand how the vision applies to our roles. It is our job to understand how it relates to our day-to-day work, down to the most menial task of updating email signatures.?

How much more productive, clear, and focused would our days be if we simply asked our managers how X, Y, and Z lines up with the company’s vision as well as how it relates to our day-to-day?

When given a task, such as a role to work on, we can respond in a few ways.

Instead of:

“Sounds good boss, I will focus on these roles.”?

We can try:

“Sounds good boss, I will focus on these roles. Just to clarify, I know that our focus has been to grow our client base in the Bay Area – it seems that these roles are directly affecting that, it sounds like this is a good direction for us, yes?”

In the first example, it is more likely that the recruiter leaves the meeting with little intensity to work on these roles, as there is no rhyme or reason behind them, they essentially exist in a void. In the second statement, although the task is exactly the same, there is direction, purpose, and intentionality behind the work as they are a confirmed part of the group’s mission. In the short and long term, this benefits the individual recruiter (more billing) as well as the team’s mission (increased business and presence in a particular area).?

Even asking simple follow up questions and bringing the daily tasks continually back to the bigger picture gives us as recruiters more direction, firms our convictions, and, at times, gives us reason to question if a certain task is even aligned with the bigger picture.?

Providing Solutions:

• ?Weekly Meetings?

In most agency recruiting companies, it is common to have a daily or weekly meeting in which each recruiter states what roles he or she is focusing on, with leadership offering guidance and direction on what areas, companies, or clients to target.?

In these meetings, however, how often are we, as recruiters, stating problems or setbacks without offering a solution?

By stating a problem without a possible solution, or even just an opinion on what could hypothetically help, we are essentially offloading responsibility to our teammates and managers, and more detrimentally, the power to change the situation ourselves.??

Alternatively, by taking the extra step of calmly stating what hurdles, obstacles, and setbacks we are facing with a current role, and then offering a potential solution to each of these, we give our managers something more tangible to work with.?

For example, instead of:

?“I am working on this Project Manager role. I have zero submittals right now as no candidates are getting back to me”??

We could say:?

“I am working on this Project Manager role. I have zero submittals right now. Based off my low response rate, I have a feeling that I am targeting candidates that are too senior for this role and/or my messaging is too wordy. I am going to broaden my search to include more candidates as well as make my messaging more succinct and to the point. Do you think this is a good strategy?”

Clearly the second example adds some workable solutions. Adding in more thought, intentionality, and self-reflection to our own work not only puts the ball back in our court to work through obstacles, but more importantly, makes our work much more coachable. This allows our leaders to have a solution to work with, letting us know if we are on the right track or if we need to attack the problem from a different angle.??

• Goals meetings:

Less frequent, but more monumental, are goals meetings. These typically occur around December to forecast for the upcoming calendar year, or at the very start of the new year to set a target number to aim for. This target number could be revenue, number of placements, and/or number of new accounts broken into on the business development side. These meetings can be as infrequent as once per year or as often as once per quarter. Ideally, in most situations, you will be referencing these goals and aligning them during every weekly check-in meeting that you have with your manager.?

The common problem though, is that these goals are often picked either ahead of time by leadership, or by the recruiter themselves. . . and then rarely looked at again.?

One could point the finger towards leadership, but I would argue that it is our jobs as recruiters to continually align ourselves with these goals. To take a step further back, given the fact that these meetings are so rare, it would behoove us all to come into these meetings incredibly prepared.?

We should be coming into these meetings with a well thought out number we are aiming for, why we are targeting this number specifically (it could be as simple as wanting to make more money), and a plan to get there.

Furthermore, we must account for any potential hurdles that we will face along the way, such as kicked offers, jobs closed, a market slowdown – the normal chaos that is agency recruiting. It never hurts to account even further for the “once in a blue moon” type of scenarios that would affect our billing. If it?is possible to happen, plan for it to happen.?

After we have picked a realistic yet stretch number to shoot for, a plan of how we are going to get there (through reverse engineering), and a bias for assuming setbacks will happen, we now have a working plan going into our meeting with our manager.

If we put ourselves in our manager’s shoes, how could coming into a meeting to set goals for the next year, with a detailed plan, accounting for hypothetical problems, and solutions to those problems, not be more helpful than coming into this meeting unprepared? How often do we as recruiters pick a number that sounds good on paper, but with no road map to get there?

By coming into our goals meetings with a sense of ownership, responsibility of the problems, and plan of attack, we allow the true magic to happen – we create the environment in which our managers can now help us.

If we think closely, our manager’s wisdom was hard-earned from years in the industry. Now, with our work presented to them, they can tweak, guide, and sharpen our goals. Our managers can do their true jobs - to lead, guide, and support us in our growth.?

Compare this with, when coming to this meeting unprepared, we put our managers in the awkward situation of having to lecture us on why we should do X, Y, or Z, or why it is important for us to hit our goals. This is our job.?

Great Performance = More Honest Than Words

The final piece that I would like to talk about regarding working well with our managers, leading up the chain of command, and getting the most out of the mentor/student dynamic, is the concept of influencing through our work.

Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working under mentors with many years of industry experience. Some have been more hands on (one may even say micromanage-y), others have been very hands off and allowed me more independence. Likewise, there were who fell within both ends of the spectrum.?

One universal truth about all the managers that I have worked under is that the language that they understood best was great performance.

A job well done. Let me explain.

When you have a micromanager, one who constantly checks on your tasks, makes sure that your tasks are completed, it is very easy to become frustrated and resentful if you take this personally. Often, with this type of manager, it may seem like the default is that you are not trusted.

The best strategy to work with such a leader is to play the long game, build trust through your actions, and slowly influence over time.

If your manager wants a weekly report of your work that you have done, instead of begrudgingly getting the task done when asked, build that into your calendar ahead of time and be prompt. Does your manager tend to check in when you are working on new roles? If so, proactively find hurdles that may come up, as well as questions about the role and be ready to speak about those.

This takes up more time in the short term, but by proactively anticipating your leader’s needs and actions, you can slowly build up your own gravitas, and your performance becomes the purest form of communication to your manager. It says that you can manage yourself.?

On the other end of the spectrum, you may have a manager who is more hands-off. In this instance, you can take the approach of utilizing your existing network of co-workers, teammates, and other departments to answer questions.

Over time, with each interaction with your manager, your questions or concerns are well thought out, vetted, and focused so that you can get exactly what you need out of the meetings without feeling like you are taking up too much valuable time or asking questions that you could have easily gotten the answers to yourself.?

This approach, again with a time investment up front, shows your manager that you have earned the trust that he or she has given to you from the start and, often, will allow more responsibility and growth to be given to you in the long term. Once again, through your actions, you have shown you are a trusted resource.?

In both situations, we show our respect to our leaders and influence them through our work, and work alone. Not in what we say we are going to do.?

In the questions that we ask, and the thoroughness with which we complete our tasks, our performance becomes our best tool for speaking and influencing.

Bringing it Together

It is our job, not our leader’s job, to be an advocate for our career, to work on finding solutions to our own problems, to care about our performance, and to motivate and influence. When we put the onus on our leaders for our performance, whether it be due to too much or too little direction, we give away power to change our situation. By approaching each situation with a bias of action, service, and offering value, we allow our leaders to do what they were meant to do.?