Your recruiting experience is only as good as your hiring managers. No matter what you do to make sure candidates are well informed with regular communication. No matter how much recruiters treat candidates with respect, just one bad interview experience can wipe it all out.
Are you measuring interview performance? Are you using candidate feedback to understand what’s working and what’s not with your recruiting experience? If not, you should be.
Interview Performance: Trust AND Verify
Recruiters often feel distrustful of hiring managers for this very reason. Trust is something that arises from understanding. When you don’t have a good understanding of what happens during interviews, it’s hard to trust.
Conversely, if you understand the good and bad of interview performance, you are in a position to manage the effectiveness of this hiring stage and TRUST that you are providing a top notch recruiting experience. Trust AND verification is the key for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is accountability.
Hold Hiring Managers Accountable for Recruiting Experience
In theory, we are all accountable for our piece of the hiring process. In most organizations, however, recruiters are ultimately accountable for all hiring performance. Hiring managers are typically not held accountable for any piece of the hiring process, let alone the interview. Not in any real way.
Without a direct report relationship between hiring managers and the recruiting function, accountability is an uphill battle. Managers are typically not hired nor compensated for their interview performance. BROADLY speaking, they are overworked and under-qualified for the role of evaluating candidates, providing excellent candidate experience and consistently delivering on their role in providing top notch recruiting experience.
So how do you hold hiring managers accountable for their piece of the recruiting process?
Ask candidates for feedback. Ask recruiters for feedback. And for good measure, ask hiring managers for feedback, too!
For a list of hiring manager feedback questions, click here.
Real Time Feedback Holds the Key to Recruiting Experience
Workiva, A leading enterprise cloud platform for data collaboration, reporting, and compliance, gets feedback from candidates shortly after they complete their interviews. They use Survale’s talent feedback platform to send out automatic feedback requests to candidates at the phone screen, hiring manager interview and offer stages of their hiring process. Survale also sends automatic feedback requests from hiring managers when the requisition is closed.
The satisfaction data they receive from candidates alerts them to issues that happen during each phase of the process, and the free form comments they leave provide detailed explanations of the issues. This feedback becomes a virtual instruction manual on how to fix issues. From set and setting, to manners, to preparedness to engagement – recruiting is now very aware of what’s happening in that important black box that is the interview.
And hiring managers now know they are being held accountable! That’s because the candidate feedback provides the data and strategies for recruiting to effectively surface issues with the managers. Trust issues? Not anymore. This feedback-driven approach removes all doubt about what’s going on and provides data to make changes and improvements working together with a common understanding.
Feedback is a Two-Way Street
It’s amazing what DATA can do to effect positive change in recruiting experience! Workiva, and many other companies like Dent Wizard and CDW, ask hiring managers for feedback about recruiter performance. It’s the other side of the same coin. Managers appreciate the respect and transparency that this feedback into the process gives them, and recruiting departments experience better alignment between the two stakeholders.
This three-way feedback loop (candidates, recruiters and hiring managers) aligns all three around hard data. Leaders don’t “suspect” that they may have interview experience problems with certain regions or individuals. They know. And they have the data to back it up. It makes fixing problems simple.
Recruiters begin to understand and identify communication or knowledge gaps they may have with their hiring managers. Again, they can use this hard data to modify their interfaces, and/or provide additional support or support materials to managers. All in all, this kind of feedback driven recruiting process shines a light on the dark corners of the hiring process and aligns matrixed interfaces to that process.
For more information about how to use feedback to optimize recruiting experience, check out these case studies from Workiva, Dent Wizard and CDW or click here to explore how other companies utilize feedback to hire more effectively
