Articles 
When it comes to recruitment, the relationship with a candidate is often put above all else. But without a positive relationship between the hiring manager and recruiter, the candidate is at real risk of enduring a poor candidate experience or even disappearing through the cracks altogether.
Either of these outcomes may result in candidates terminating their application, refusing your offer, or refraining from purchasing your product or service in the future.
How to improve the relationship between the hiring manager and recruiter:
1. Get Off to a Good Start
Start your relationship on the right foot with a kick-off call or in-person conversation where the hiring manager (HM) and the recruiter can get on the same page.
During the meeting, the hiring manager and recruiter can list the qualifications required of the candidate, outline team responsibilities, and review past successful candidates for similar roles. With the Avature ATS feature Find Similar, recruiters can search your database using the characteristics of 10 previously successful candidates.
After determining your search criteria together, map out an interview plan (interview stages, particular areas of focus, and follow-up), along with a sourcing strategy – where should the search be focused? Which companies have the kind of candidates we’re looking for? Which job boards specifically target those roles?
2. Work Together
A relationship is a two-way street and requires both collaboration and accountability. Make sure you finish your kick-off meeting by setting deadlines and Service Level Agreements, i.e., the tasks that must be completed by both hiring manager and recruiter to move the process forward.
This may seem unnecessarily formal, but it allows both parties to hold each other to account and keep the process humming along smoothly.
With the intuitive workflows and flexibility of today’s advanced technology, you can automate many tasks and reminders. This can lighten the burden of remembering to carry out actions, while offering the added benefit of facilitating compliance with recruiting requirements.
For example, you can restrict moving a candidate forward in the recruiting process until either the recruiter or hiring manager has completed a task, such as providing a disposition reason.
3. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
As with any relationship, the bond between hiring manager and recruiter relies on healthy communication. Make it your mission to become a proactive communicator, even at the risk of “over-communicating.”
This doesn’t have to take all of your time. It can be just a brief email or quick note at key milestones, e.g. an invite to an intake session after x hours of requisition, an email with a screening summary of proposed candidates, a follow-up call after interviews, or a quick update on candidate offer status.
In Avature, communication is made easy. Every engagement with a candidate is recorded within the journal on their profile. In addition, recruiters have their own overview dashboard where they can easily see the status of their communications with both candidate and recruiter – providing constant visibility of their recruiting activities.
4. Be Realistic. Be Specific.
While a good recruiter can occasionally pull the perfect candidate out of a hat, they’re not actually magicians. HMs shouldn’t set unrealistic standards for potential candidates. Instead, they should prioritize skills and qualifications.
Try sitting down at the beginning of each search to decide on 3 must-have skills/personality traits, plus 3-5 “nice to haves.” If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at the HM’s current team and consider which core skills have helped past candidates who weren’t 100% perfect at the beginning become great fits in the long run.
5. Build Trust
The old adage about relationships also applies here – trust is fundamental.
As a recruiter, be honest with your HM in terms of what you are capable of. For example, if you don’t feel you have the technical knowledge required to adequately interview a lead programmer, let your HM know from the outset – they may then choose to be present during the interview to probe for the necessary information or provide the technical training so you or another team member can conduct the interview properly.
If you’re recruiting for hard-to-fill roles that require more engagement time than is typical, being open and honest about this from the start will enable you to build a strong, fruitful relationship.
Honesty remains crucial throughout the process, especially when it’s time to provide feedback. HMs should keep in mind that honest feedback on candidates will give the recruiters the information they need to be more successful in the future.
6. Stay Consistent
Your hiring process should run like a well-oiled machine. Begin every search by defining key knock-out style application questions to help identify top prospects more easily.
Then, during the screening phase, request screening forms to be completed before a candidate can be passed to an HM, ensuring that the HM has all the information they need to move the candidate forward.
Make sure both your recruiters and hiring managers are adhering to the same standardized interview process, from bench-marking candidates against the same criteria across the board to providing candidates with the appropriate message at the appropriate time.
Smart automation can help with the latter by sending custom messages to candidates at specific milestones – such as a pre-interview preparation email or an interview follow-up for top candidates.
To further refine your process, you can harness automation to send post-interview feedback forms so that candidates can help improve both recruiter and HM performance, as well as demonstrate areas for wider improvement.
7. Give your Relationship the Support it Needs
Every relationship requires a bit of effort, but the right tools can make a world of difference. Leverage an Application Tracking System to reduce lower-value-added work and allow recruiters and HM to easily communicate and collaborate. Remove the stress from the recruiting process through the use of intuitive workflows.
For example, once candidates are initially screened, a hiring manager could be automatically informed of top candidates, or when an HM finishes an interview, they could receive an automatic prompt to give feedback.
