Recruiting Brand 101 – Candidates Think Your Hiring Managers are L.A.M.E.

Kris Dunn Always Be Closing, Culture, Recruiting

How’s your recruiting brand?  Got the website, collateral for candidates, maybe even some video?

Cool!!!!

Do your hiring managers reinforce the brand you are trying to create?  Or are they lame, non-communicators destroying all the brand equity you’re building in your company as an “employer of choice?”

Stop and think about this one.  A while back, I riffed that the best way to lose talent was to be slow.  Slow to call candidates back after phone screens, slow to get them in to interview after phone screens, slow to pick them up in the lobby for the interview, whatever.  Act slow and candidates start to think your company is a boring, stale, disorganized place to work.  Period.

Speed to market is still my number one driver to create candidate momentum and get a deal inked with the talent you covet.  DDI/Monster recently repackaged the same survey results and focused on ineffective hiring managers, so it’s a good time to revisit the other drivers that make candidates think your workplace stinks.  Here are the top drivers of candidate dissatisfaction in the interview process from the DDI study:

“70 Percent of Job Seekers Say Aloof is Annoying. Job seekers identify a number of interviewerInterviewhabits behaviors that adversely affect their willingness to work at the company in question. For instance, 70% of interviewees rank “acting like has no time to talk to me” as a common – and annoying– behavior of hiring managers and staffing directors. Other irritating behaviors exhibited by interviewers include:
– Withholding information about position (57%)
– Turning interview into cross-examination (51%)
– Showing up late (48%)
– Appearing unprepared for interview (47%)
– Asking questions unrelated to job skills (43%)”
This should be scary to every HR Pro, because you can spend 10-20 hours on a search, only to have your hard work destroyed by a hiring manager who considers interviewing the 10th or 11th most important task they’ve handled on a given day.  More important than the destruction of your personal work is the loss of the best talent available, which means you’ll soon be filling the same position again.
What’s the best strategy for limiting the influence of hiring managers with the personality/demeanor of a depressed, irritable Dr. Cox from Scrubs?  My favorite strategy is to rely on one or two hiring managers per department who have proven their marketing abilities in the recruiting process.
Eliminate the deadbeats from the process or pay the price…