As your passionate recruiting manager, I give everything I've got to find and keep the people we hire and grow your company in a way that makes people proud to do work here.  You respond by telling me I am not hiring fast enough, yet I work overtime...I work weekends...I am typically the first person in the office to smile at candidates and I'm the last person to leave after our interviews are over for the day.  I'm your candidate experience cheerleader and I manage the haystack of relationships circling your revolving door of rejected candidates.  

"Make sure they all have the same candidate experience!"

You continue to bark at me, excusing your behavior with excuses like "our investors and board of directors are pressuring our executive team to meet head count objectives!"   You ask me in a passive-aggressive manner:

"Why are we behind schedule with hiring? Why aren't we hiring fast enough! You ARE the expert, aren't YOU?"  

I get it.  You need to build your product.  You need to deliver happiness in the form of features to your growing user base.  We need to hit hiring goals and build toward revenue targets to maximize shareholder value.  We need to keep everyone happy and employed.  Well, maybe not happy.

You may think I am failing you as a recruiting manager but what do you know about recruiting?  I am the expert....remember? Oh, you've interviewed a bunch of candidates in this skill-set, so that makes you an expert in supply chain, candidate marketing, candidate engagement, sourcing, recruiting, and human relationship management?  Riiiiiiiiight.  Well, Mr and Mrs. C-Level...  

Recruiting has become more than, "Can they do the job, will they do the job, are they a culture fit?" 

Please allow me to educate you in the world of demanding people, messed up processes, and silly recruiting tools...We call it recruiting.......and if you pay attention....there might even be an actionable insight you can take away.  

11 reasons why corporate recruiting managers fail...

1. Root Cause Identification: There isn't a data-driven method to pinpoint the root cause of a recruiting problem on internal / external recruiting teams.  

2. Best Practices: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are focused on workflow and tracking, capturing data related to hiring a candidate but not nearly focused enough on “how best to hire a candidate” or "how best to recruit."  

If you need help in these areas, go here.

3. Planning: Your recruiting team responsible for sourcing, recruiting, and hiring is impacted daily with necessary updates that influence a job opening that they never get or get too late. Here is an idea - develop a plan and build out your KPI's before you open the new job, so you know what and why you are hiring.  Recruiters need visibility and transparency behind the motives of "why are we hiring for a new role" because it directly impacts the hiring success or failure.  Otherwise recruiters look stupid when candidates and coworkers ask "why?"  Talk about credibility problems. Involve your recruiters, please.

4. Communication:  When you do pass on information to your recruiting leader, you tell him/her recruiting manager but he/she is inundated with meetings and hiring manager counsel sessions.  By the time information is passed onto the people actually doing the recruiting, it is no longer important information because a new update supersedes the importance of the old one.  Good luck with that. 

5. Engagement not tied to Incentives:  We might spend between 1M - 200M on our talent acquisition program annually, yet we don’t have access to a streamlined program that tracks and manages recruiting performance in a programmatic fashion.  There is no method, whether it is customizable or predefined, to help evaluate and manage performance of internal and external recruiting teams.  We can’t inspire change, increase engagement, or collaborate with recruiting teams/recruiters in realtime.  

6. Key Performance Indicators (KPI): It’s a major problem that we only measure recruiting team performance on a case by "​hire"​ case and it isn’t predictable, cost effective, or strategic.  This reactive approach neglects benchmarking and it prevents optimization in cost, speed, quality, forecasting and of course, performance.  Performance based hiring is legit.

7. Inaccurate Data: When neglecting performance data, we don’t have a real-time strategy with pivoting power to understand who our top performing recruiting teams/recruiters are in the areas that we find most valuable at any given time.  Whether we want speed, cost, quality, specialities, or referrals.  We don't know what we want or need.  We can’t predict.  We can’t recognize performance over fluke. We can’t anticipate problems. We don’t know which agencies we should enlist help from because we have zero-quality data and we are too busy reacting to fire drills.   Emotional hiring managers are running behind schedule pressuring us while we continue to recruit in the dark. 

8. Bureaucracy and Politics: Recruiting managers can’t communicate changes to everyone involved in the change in a timely, centralized fashion, and this impacts internal and external recruiting teams’ efforts.  As your recruiting manager, we don’t have a fast method to reach everyone impacted.  There is no way to broadcast conversation related to feedback, candidate updates, interview notes, req updates, or other program details impacting the internal and external recruiting team success.  There is no forum to provide feedback or clarify without causing email bottlenecks, confusion, and constant chasing.  Recruiting leaders forget or give up on providing essential updates impacting hiring decisions. 

9. (Lack of) Information Sharing:  Changes happen hourly and it impacts recruiting teams ability to match and qualify talent.  Some of these changes aren't restricted from recruiting teams.  Sourcing, recruiting, and candidates are dependent on the dissemination of the information contained within these changes.  Share more information with the reason behind the change.

10. Process or Technology: Recruiting processes built around existing software fail as a conduit system between hiring managers and candidates communication.  It takes way too long for updates, notifications, and alerts to reach their destination.  This causes hiring teams to miss offer and decision deadlines, impacting candidate experience, partner relationships, loyalty, and hiring success. 

11. Burnout, Lack of Recognition: Burnout is a huge problem in the recruiting industry.  After dealing with constant pressure from executive leaders and hiring managers who want to hire faster and don't care how....recruiting leaders quickly run out of positive ways to inspire recruitment performance in recruiting teams.   Positive reinforcement quickly turns into subdued threats.  Fear-based methods lead to escalations, increased turnover, and reduced morale.  Recruiting managers end up micromanaging or neglecting “un-coachable” recruiters with counterproductive effects on performance.  What is earned on Friday isn't praised and forgotten on Monday.  Recruiting departments can be miserable places to manage recruiters and an even worse place for those subordinates trapped under yours truly, your clueless, underperforming, not-hiring-fast-enough recruiting manager.  Bless your heart. 

Learn about SourcingTalent.Cloud - Freelancer Marketplace for HR and Sourcing Professionals.

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The almost-finished SourcingTalent.Cloud is a freelancer marketplace for project owners in HR and Talent Sourcing. HR and sourcing leaders who are project owners can find help and hire freelance consultants to complete projects.

Sign up for our pilot here: http://sourcingtalent.cloud

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Chmielinski is a second generation recruiting veteran, former baseball player, and founder of Veruca.io, the first ever recruiting innovations lab. His company is built from two generations of sales and recruiting experience resting on the backbone of post-millennial technology. 

Last year, Veruca.io: Find (Mr. Chmielinski's inaugural software) attracted 178 active users in 114 cities from 17 countries.

This year, James created largest recruiting community on slack called "Recruiting Innovators", a hub-spot for recruiting jobs, networking, news, and best practices. 

His latest project, SourcingTalent.Cloud (http://sourcingtalent.cloud), is scheduled for a pilot program release within the quarter. Sign up for the pilot by emailing info@sourcingtalent.cloud. Help us by taking this survey to make sure we include all work categories.

James aims to make life easier for sourcing and recruiting teams and hopes to achieve this by developing an innovation lab where teams convert the best ideas into products.