Recruiters, who are your hiring manager heroes?

Earlier this year, I shared on Linkedin the below infographic from John Vlastelica. Given that over 20,000 people viewed this, it must have struck a chord with many of my peers. In my view, this is because it cuts to the heart of one of the biggest challenges faced daily by recruiters - hiring manager engagement.  All managers want the best people to work for them. But how many really feel a responsibility to drive the recruiting process? And how many instead outsource it to talent acquisition and then complain when the calibre they desire does not materialise?

Recruiting is a people business - whether you have been working in this industry for two minutes or two decades you will have encountered C and D grade hiring leaders. We all know who they are.

But just as there are different grades of hiring leaders, there exists a similar spectrum of recruiting professionals too. I have no doubt that the hiring leaders reading this article can just as easily recall the C and D grade recruiters they have encountered.

With this mindset, it can become easy to overlook that we are partners working towards a common goal, i.e. to attract, nurture and hire the best talent for the business. I feel all parties would benefit from more self-reflection here and to agree that in a rapidly changing world, everyone has room to improve. This applies whether you sit on the hiring manager or recruiter side of the fence.  And rather than bemoan the challenges we encounter with hiring leaders so much, I’d love to see the recruiting industry do more to shine a light on the A+ hiring managers – or as I prefer to call them, our hiring heroes. Hence my goal in this post is to ignite that narrative by telling you a story about one of my hiring heroes, who understands that to get the best people, in the optimum timeframe, the importance of rolling up his sleeves and being a driving participant versus side-line observer. 

Best practise case study 

I want to focus on a hiring campaign I co-ran with Mona Elsamahy for Olivier Sabella. Olivier leads a function of over three hundred employees who sell LinkedIn’s talent products to small and medium sized businesses across Western Europe. This is all done from one central location, LinkedIn EMEA’s Irish based headquarters in Dublin. Beneath Olivier’s ever calm demeanour and dulcet French tones, is an incredibly well read, strategic, compassionate leader, coach and purveyor of operational excellence.

Olivier knew that getting the best salespeople in seat at the right time is critical to sustaining and accelerating revenue growth. Notwithstanding the fact that core hiring metrics were already green, Olivier was proactive, and wanted us to think more strategically than reactively. In Summer 2019, he sat down with us and started planning for our January 2020 incremental hiring campaign. Olivier already ran a tight-ship and we had been partnering well with his business but for this campaign, he took the interaction to a new and deeper level. 

Some of you may already be familiar with the priority matrix framework below. If not, LinkedIn’s Chief Business Officer Dan Shapero discusses it in more detail in this excellent article. Olivier leveraged the priority matrix to thrash out and agree what our shared priorities should be to enhance hiring efforts moving forward. He invested significant time to actively explore this with us as he understood the importance and impact it could have. Once priorities were agreed, he set the tone from the top, and communicated expected actions and behaviours to hiring managers across his organisation.

I will briefly share with you the highlights of what we agreed. We decided that home runs were our top priority – high value activities with a high probability of success. These included:

• Streamlining and creating a consistent interview process - across all regions to improve efficiency and candidate experience
• First approach by hiring managers. We identified a 56% uplift in in-mail responses from prospective candidates when the initial outreach came directly from hiring manager.
• Events & referral campaigns –In person recruiting events hosted alongside hiring leaders yielded a very strong return on investment for us. (Note these were held pre-Covid).
• Talent Branding – media campaigns across all regions to raise awareness and increase top of funnel. We engaged with internal employees at all levels to get their pictures, quotes, and organic content to feature on campaigns we ran across the LinkedIn platform. 

Getting ahead of the curve

Our big bet was a new experimental initiative called Project Duracell. Olivier agreed to sponsor and test this within his business, with the goal being to get ahead of hiring asks. We worked closely with colleagues in finance to secure insights into upcoming incremental hiring needs. We leveraged this to engage with candidates and take them through interview processes before the hiring campaign actually launched. Successful candidates were given a letter of intent indicating that once the headcount became approved in January 2020, they were already pre-approved for hire and we would move straight to offer.

Once we launched the hiring campaign, letters of intent helped us close 35% of our incremental headcount in just 30 days. By comparison it took us 60 days to fill 20% of incremental headcount the previous year. 

Enterprise Talent Leadership

To me, Olivier encompasses what Jonathan Trevor from Said Business School, Oxford University refers to as “enterprise leadership”. This means going beyond...

“simply leading people and being inspiring…but operating at a macro level, being the architect of the business and how it delivers value”.

Not only is Olivier an A+ hiring manager on an individual basis, he is the orchestrater of an A+ hiring ecosystem of engaged hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals.

I know I hit the jackpot by getting to work with and learn from a leader so committed to making talent a top operating priority. Thank you, Olivier. 

Season of Goodwill

I think we can all agree 2020 has been a tough and challenging year. With Thanksgiving just behind us, I strongly encourage the recruiters in my network to share stories about their own hiring heroes in the comment section below. Or better still, share a post about them on LinkedIn. Remember, not all hiring heroes wear capes. Thank them for their partnership, share with the LinkedIn community why they are great and shine a light on the impact they have had. My wish for 2021 is by calling out the A grade hiring leaders, everyone else will be inspired to up their game.  

The views expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me here on LinkedIn and/or on Twitter @mariecherlihy

You can also check out my previous articles here:

Talent Intelligence: A Recruiter's View

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