Tell me about a time when you've dealt with hiring manager push back..

So what do you do in this situation. Being in HR as a recruiter I've seen a handful of managers simply push back on every policy that's been presented. Whether it was strictly recruiting related, or more towards a general HR policy. A more specific situation would be when my company introduced Behavioral Interviewing as our standard interview methodology. Quite a few managers pushed back on me when training them on the strategy. When a manager has done the same thing for a long time, it's tough to change their way of thinking and show them that you are simply trying to make them better.

Once we got them to open up to the idea of behavioral interviewing, it was then they started to see how it may be an effective tool. It wasn't until a few rounds of interviews went by and successful candidates were picked quicker that managers really felt it was a solid practice.

So, tell me about a time when you've dealt with push back. How did you overcome it?
Thanks!

-Rich

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Permalink Reply by Peter Ceccarelli on July 23, 2009 at 4:00pm

We deal with it ALL of the time. Daily! It's part of the game. People generally don't like change. Hiring managers are people. They too don't like change when wearing their hiring manager hat. You deal with it. Behavioral or compentency based interviewing typically garners better hires because you are digging deeper. If they can't get that and don't want to change, none of us can force a hiring manager to do what we request of them, until the turnover gets so bad that either their job is in jeopardy or they cry uncle and buck up to best practice hiring processes.

I've been at this a long time. Push back is part of the game. Once you establish crediblity with a hiring manger and you have successes with them the push back usually stops and they worship the ground you walk on. Well some of the time!

Are you new in your role? That might be why you have push back, or the hiring manager is new to the company and of course, they always know more than you do because recruiting is "so easy"........right!

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Permalink Reply by Richard Dematteo on July 23, 2009 at 4:30pm

Hey Peter, that's great feed back. I wanted to just open it up to the table to see if people could give specific situations, and what methods they used to over come it.

I think you are spot on. Credibility is the name of the game. Once you show the hiring manager a trick or two they haven't seen, they tend to follow you wherever you go. I worked 2 years on the staffing agency side in the IT world, and then spent 2 years at Primavera Systems as a corporate recruiter in HR. Primavera was acquired by Oracle which then resulted in my entire HR team being let go.

I'm currently just running my blog site to help out job seekers. It's www.cornonthejob.com if you want to check it out.

And i love your sarcasm at the end. Everyone thinks recruiting is a piece of cake. What they don't realize is there are usually a lot of mouths that need to be fed that cake!

Peter Ceccarelli said:

We deal with it ALL of the time. Daily! It's part of the game. People generally don't like change. Hiring managers are people. They too don't like change when wearing their hiring manager hat. You deal with it. Behavioral or compentency based interviewing typically garners better hires because you are digging deeper. If they can't get that and don't want to change, none of us can force a hiring manager to do what we request of them, until the turnover gets so bad that either their job is in jeopardy or they cry uncle and buck up to best practice hiring processes.

I've been at this a long time. Push back is part of the game. Once you establish crediblity with a hiring manger and you have successes with them the push back usually stops and they worship the ground you walk on. Well some of the time!

Are you new in your role? That might be why you have push back, or the hiring manager is new to the company and of course, they always know more than you do because recruiting is "so easy"........right!

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Permalink Reply by Ross Clennett on July 23, 2009 at 7:28pm

I successfully dealt with push back, especially from from 'left brain' types eg accountants, IT, lawyers, engineers etc, by producing books, research papers or research-based articles to prove my point re behavioural intervewing. Using a third-party expert helps the policy you are implementing to be viewed as one that is best-practice rather than 'HR just complicating things'

I have found interviewing and candidate assessment articles from Dr Wendell Williams (available for free on www.ere.net) to be especially well-written, logical, credible and accessible for hiring managers when they want to understand why they should change their existing interview habits. Of course, having a directive from the CEO or COO never hurts!