3 Questions to Ask When Choosing A Recruiter Or Hiring Manager
When you first started scaling your startup deciding between a recruiter or hiring manager isn’t a decision you actively had to make. You didn’t have the bandwidth to bring on a dedicated recruiter so people managers began to double as hiring managers. The management team split their days between building the best product possible, keeping team members focused, recruiting and filling new employee needs as they came up. Hiring is a big job for any person but it feels even more so when they are in charge of every step of the process plus a vital role at the company.
You do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do but when do you know that’s possible? When does your hiring process get a dedicated boss?
Deciding to bring on a recruiter starts with evaluating the effectiveness of a recruiter versus a hiring manager specifically as it relates to these questions:
Does your hiring manager still have the bandwidth to manage the team, perform job duties, and recruit and land quality candidates?
Are you failing to attract diverse candidates to your pipeline?
Are you unable to recruit and land senior candidates?
These questions are going to determine when you make the investment in hiring a person dedicated to growing your most important asset—your team.
Recruiters and hiring managers, whose skill set is better equipped at helping you?
Recruiters and hiring managers operate with different priorities when starting a new employee search. They also have nurtured different skill sets. Recruiters are hyper focused on accomplishing the end goal of hiring the perfect employee. Their experience leads them to craft detailed job postings, place them on the right job boards, Slack channels, and within their well cultivated network. Their recruiter brains help them weed out okay candidates and find those with the expertise to handle the job while positively influencing the team culture.
They work quickly and efficiently, especially when they’re tasked with filling similar or adjacent roles.
Hiring managers don’t always work as deftly as recruiters because they aren’t dedicating 100% of their time to finding, evaluating, and hiring new team members. Since they are doing double duty, the hiring process can take longer when managed by a hiring manager. The upside is that hiring managers are already loyal to you, especially if they’ve previously held different roles at your company before taking on hiring duties.
There comes a point that sheer loyalty isn’t enough to build your team and you need recruiter know how over the passion of a hiring manager. It’s a good decision to choose a recruiter when the hiring manager is too overwhelmed with other duties to move as swiftly as you need them to versus dragging out the hiring process.
Recruiters and hiring managers, who’s better at attracting diverse candidates?
According to The Ladders, the ideal hiring process takes 30 days or less. Any longer and you risk them losing interest or possibly accepting another offer. Thirty days is the ideal time to attract candidates and go through a few rounds of interviews before finally extending the offer. If you get through round 2 or 3 (or higher) and still haven’t found the right candidate, the issue is on how you’re finding candidates. If you made an actionable pledge to lead a more inclusive company the issue in your pipeline may be a lack of diverse clients.
While it seems like a Catch-22, that you can’t attract diverse employees until you hire diverse employees, a valuable recruiter knows that diverse employees bring higher profits and more innovative ideas and have already made diversity (and inclusion) a priority by cultivating a diverse network and avoiding counterproductive practices.
A recruiter who’s already started doing the work knows where to show up to find the candidates that are going to bring their innovation to your team. In the situation that you’re struggling to bring diverse employees into your pipeline, the right recruiter has kept up with their network of fellow recruiters, trends, and strategies so diverse employees aren’t a stretch of their skill set.
Hiring managers though are learning to recruit candidates alongside their job so they are at a distinct disadvantage to professionals who don’t only know where to start but are halfway to the finish line.
Recruiters and hiring managers, who’s more skilled at landing senior candidates?
Senior hires such as department heads and other first hires are team members that you don’t want to get wrong as they’ll shape the department and presumably the hires that follow them. As I mentioned before, one of the downsides of a longer hiring process is that you may lose out on candidates who take another job. This more than often comes into play with competitive senior candidates.
In a survey by Finances Online, 75% of recruiters have experienced candidates changing their minds sometime during the hiring process. It’s just a reminder that candidates are vetting employers just as much as you’re vetting them so don’t assume that you liking a candidate is enough to close them, especially in this environment. It’s important to move quickly but having the experience of a recruiter specifically skilled at closing senior hires comes in handy, especially if they come with a pre-vetted pool of candidates.
Salaries are always an important part of the hiring process but it’s not the only thing future employees consider, especially in this post-pandemic environment with increased personal responsibilities leading to burnout. One method in navigating around this is having a comprehensive compensation and benefits package that shows you value your employee’s well-being as much as you value their work product. A package that includes healthcare, a 401k, paid time off, a tech allowance, flexible working, etc is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for you in connecting with that senior hire.
Attracting and hiring senior candidates takes a more experienced skill set which is why you may want to rely on someone more experienced at landing similar employees.
Conclusions
Recruiters and hiring managers are both capable of helping you expand your team. Deciding who to go with means weighing how quickly you want to hire, how important it is to expand out of your existing circles and if you’re currently competitive enough to woo senior talent. If there’s a point in the hiring process where you feel stuck, a recruiter can help you get unstuck. While a hiring manager will use precision to build a team based on loyalty one candidate at a time.