Support your managers or risk losing them to your competitor

Retaining employees has become more important than ever with the advent of the great resignation. Companies should do everything possible to make their employees feel valued and appreciated. This article will focus on ways you can support your managers.

Hiring:

Hiring has never been easy, but it has become even more difficult over the last two years. First, we had COVID, and now we have “great resignation.” We should also be prepared for the impending exit of baby boomers from the workforce. So, hiring is not going to become easier!

Sourcing Candidates:

Most managers only hire 3-4 times per year, so it is unreasonable to expect a manager to be a hiring expert. By supporting your managers to make hiring easier, you are relieving a stressful process, which will help with retention.

How can you make hiring easier? Give them the resources to source great candidates. Some companies have internal recruiters or talent acquisition teams that try to find candidates. Unfortunately, most of these individuals have limited industry experience and do not have a network of candidates to pull from. So they must rely on job postings.

This typically creates several problems: First, the candidates that apply are entirely unknown and may be on a performance improvement plan with their current company. Secondly, since many talent acquisition recruiters do not have industry experience, they are not certain if a candidate is a good fit. So they rely on the ATS to screen out the candidates. Most of the hiring managers we have spoken with are unhappy with this process since they are sent 25-50 resumes to review and then have to decide which candidates are worth a phone screening. Companies may save money using this process since they are not paying a third-party recruiter, but are they truly saving money? If a manager spends a large portion of their time reviewing resumes and interviewing unqualified candidates, we would argue they are not being utilized to the best of their ability.

I spoke to a VP of Talent Acquisition last week, and he told me that the availability of TA candidates was sparse. He is in the process of hiring and has discovered that all the available candidates change jobs very frequently (90% of the candidates have been at their current job for less than 1 year) and have limited experience. Some companies hire recruiters from third-party firms, without realizing that recruiters who leave an external firm and go to a corporate position may not be the best.

Interviewing Candidates:

Our firm spends at least one hour per week training for interviewing and selecting the best candidates. We have done this since I started recruiting 21 years ago. How can we recommend candidates if we don’t know how to select and vet them? We owe it to our clients!

Do you offer training to your hiring managers on how to interview and select candidates? If you do, you are one of the few that do so! When is the last time your managers have been through a training class on hiring? Since most hiring managers are the decision-makers on who they hire, they should be trained appropriately.

I would recommend Lou Adler’s training program. We have been reading and studying his books on hiring for the last 3 years. We try to pass our knowledge to our hiring managers; some are receptive, and others are not. All we can do is try. There is no way to improve if you are not open-minded.

Summary:

Selecting candidates, interviewing, and making a hiring decision is only getting harder. Let your managers focus on leading their teams by giving them professional resources (external recruiters) to hire new employees.

I doubt you are saving money by keeping recruiting in-house. Plus you are making your manager's jobs more difficult and are not seeing the best candidates.