Relationship building to meet hiring manager expectations

- Have you ever started a search for a hiring manager, gone through the entire process, spent weeks identifying candidates, and finally narrowing down your slate so that you can present your top choices only to have them tell you that none of the candidates meet their requirements? Welcome to recruiting. This misalignment of expectation and outcome happens when you haven't learned from the very beginning what the hiring manager is looking for. You don't really know what type of candidate they're expecting you to identify. A hiring manager will normally have an idea of the person in their head, and that idea is what causes your problem. The idea grows larger than the actual candidates you were able to identify. So to get ahead of that, put your influencing skills to use. What have you said or done to influence a hiring manager? What made it effective? Take a moment to pause and write down those skills so you can be more deliberate about using them in the future. What makes influencing as a skill so difficult is it's really an umbrella for a number of other skill sets that you need. Conflict resolution, communication, negotiation skills, teamwork, empathy, and patience just to name a few. When hiring managers say they are seeking a candidate who gets along well with others, they are actually looking for these interpersonal skills. The irony is, if you don't also have these underlying skills you will be unable to influence. Influencing goes hand in hand with the ability to sell, so it's no surprise that it's an additional in-demand skill of a recruiter. When we think of sales, we think of our sales teams. We think of someone who is cold calling or is out wining and dining potential customers. What we sometimes forget is that the hiring manager is our customer. Your skill in selling will come from your understanding of the sales cycle and improve your ability to help a hiring manager see things from your perspective to close the deal you are trying to make, I.e. hire the candidate you were introducing. A recruiter in one of my workshops a few years ago was frustrated with a hiring manager who refused to hire engineering candidates from a particular school. He concluded that this school didn't produce graduates who met his criteria for a qualified engineer within his department. The recruiter wanted to know how to handle this objection because he didn't think it was right to immediately discard applicants from this school. The hiring manager had already made up his mind about the type of employee he deemed qualified. For this recruiter to influence future decisions, he needed to know what the skills were that the hiring manager believed were lacking from candidates who attended this school, but he also needs to sell the hiring manager on his own skill and abilities as a recruiter. Your relationship with the hiring manager is strengthened by their faith in your ability to understand and help them accomplish their goal. Easier said than done, but I've added an outline of these steps in the handout. For skills-based recruiting to make you a successful recruiter, you have to influence the hiring manager to implement skills-based hiring, and you have to do it before decisions get made about qualifications that are no longer true requirements. Your ability to build a relationship with a hiring manager trusts your knowledge, expertise, and advice will depend upon your ability to sell yourself as the recruiter for the job.