When its time to hire, we see most if not all hiring managers under pressure – particularly hiring managers who work in small to mid sized companies without an in house recruiter or an HR team large enough to provide dedicated hiring support. Regular work often gets compromised, delayed or moved around to carve out time for resume screening, interviews, and other types of candidate screening. If there is a misstep along the way – a step in the process missed or done haphazardly – and its easy to end up in a hiring mistake.

35-50% of all hiring decisions turn out to be hiring errors at some point in the 12 months after hire.  

If you are a hiring manager who isn’t fortunate enough to have a recruiter by your side, you know what I mean. You’re on your own when it comes to getting help walking thru a multi step hiring process, picking up the pieces of tedious work along the way, and keeping you from making the wrong decision just to be done with the process.

Unfortunately, most small to medium sized companies don’t have the resources it takes to support a best practices based hiring process. Even with an in house HR team, recruiting is only one of many things that team does, leaving hiring managers without a lot of support when it comes to hiring.

And we know that drill. 85% of our clients are small to medium sized businesses who know the steps they need to take to hire right, but don’t have the resources it takes to do them quickly and efficiently. When the hiring process slows down, hiring decisions get delayed and important work doesn’t get done. A lot of our new clients come to us when things get out of hand. They need our help either to augment the few resources they have, or in some cases to take full charge and orchestrate the entire hiring process from beginning to end.

This blog is being written to point out the many ways in which a recruiting partner can  make a big difference to hiring outcomes. While no recruiter, in house or outsourced, can guarantee hiring success (the human part of human resources) we know that hiring outcomes are always improved when there are folks in the background who have the tools and expertise to quickly and efficiently execute some of the higher impact steps in the hiring process.   

And recruiting expertise matters.  Whether a company decides to work with a recruiter they source from the outside, or to spend the money to develop recruiting talent from within, we wanted to make the case of why the right recruiting partner is so important to hiring success!  Check out this list of how the right recruiter makes a big difference to your hiring process and ultimately your hiring results.   

#1 They will help you create the “RIGHT” candidate profile! 

One of the big contributions of a savvy recruiter is that they can step in to help the hiring manager pin point the type of candidate they are looking for PRIOR TO starting the recruit.  Hiring managers tend to think the job description describes the candidate profile but that’s almost never the case. In fact we find that most hiring errors get created because not enough time is spent really drilling down on the type of candidate needed. 

The experienced recruiter will not only help with this homework but will make sure that right hiring homework starts the process, saving countless hours of recruiting, screening, and candidate evaluation time down the road.

• The real work content (not just what’s on the job description.
• Clarity about what a successful hire needs to do /achieve.
• The skill and knowledge must haves, not the wanna haves.
• The context in which the job will be done which is so important to a successful hiring outcome.
• Why the right candidate will love this job!

#2  They will help you minimize opportunities for hiring bias!    

If you re-invent the wheel for each candidate you eliminate your ability to compare and contrast a wide range of candidate behaviors and your ability to select those candidates who are most likely to achieve the results they are hired to produce.

Your hiring partner will ensure the consistency of your hiring process and help you uncover real differences in a candidate’s “fit” for the job. If every candidate is treated differently, even given different interview questions, you won’t be able to compare one candidate to another, and you’ll end up guessing which candidate would be the right fit.

#3  They will do all the tedious TRUST BUT VERIFY pieces of the hiring process – leaving the hiring manager “fresh” to do what only they can do!  

If your current candidate vetting process has too much trust and not enough verify, someone offering to do the verification pieces of your hiring process can quickly become value add.  We’ve all been there – fallen in “like” with a candidate who had all the trappings of a “fit” to the point where we don’t take the important next step and verify that who we are talking to in the interview process, or who is described on a resume, is the same person who shows up for work 2-3 months down the road.

Those of us who’ve been around recruiting for a while know that just because a candidate “seems right” doesn’t mean they are right and a commitment to trust but verify is the only way to manage those gut level reactions that all too often can result in hiring errors.

To add value, the verification step of your recruiting process needs to include.

• Candid conversations with former employers – did what a candidate  tell us during their interview match up with what a former employer describes.  People will always put their best foot forward during the hiring process but what you need to know is how they actually have behaved on the job.  And raise at least pink flag if a candidate doesn’t provide you with the names of people who actually supervised their work. Friends and co worker references can be helpful but they never replace the need to talk with someone who actually had the responsibility for the employee’s performance.
• Independent and Professional crafted assessments of a candidate’s skill levels – can be particularly important in jobs where a high level of knowledge and skills is critical to successful performance, or for more entry level jobs where the ability to spot “aptitude” not experience is the key element required for hiring success.
• Contacts to schools and colleges – to verify that the candidate earned the degrees and certifications they claim. Verifications of a candidate’s educational background are increasing in popularity as the tendency for candidates to “exaggerate” in this area has increased.
• Multiple interviewers – who can compare notes on what the candidate told them about what.  Recruiters and hiring managers should be taking notes at every step in the selection process as its those inconsistencies in a candidate’s responses that are important red flags.

#4 They make sure you leave no stones unturned when it comes to making sure you hire the right person!  

Creating a hiring process that moves too fast, has too few steps, and you run the risk of settling for the first candidate who may be “just okay”. Use a process that moves to too slowly or there are too many steps, and run the risk of encouraging the wrong hiring decisions just to be done with the process. Your hiring partner can’t move too slow or too fast. Their screening needs to be thorough but quick.

FINAL THOUGHTS

One of the great things about being a recruiter is that there are so many opportunities for us to deliver value to a hiring manager.  

We’ve seen so many companies add to their hiring mistakes because they ask their hiring managers to do too much. The right recruiting partner who can pick up the slack for a busy hiring manager makes a huge difference in who and how your company hires.