Recruiting Tips For Hiring Managers: A Guide For Effective Staffing

Ask any hiring manager and they’ll tell you that hiring takes time and even more money. Considering that onboarding an employee may cost thousands of dollars, you can’t afford to rehire for the same role again. 

Furthermore, attracting the right people is far from easy so when a perfect (or close to perfect) candidate applies for a position, your hiring manager(s) must capitalize on the opportunity by providing an impeccable candidate experience. 

Because quality candidates are few and far between, establishing an effective hiring process is essential. Fortunately, you can make positive changes by implementing certain recruiting tips for hiring managers we’ll cover in today’s blog.

Here are our top 6:

1. Define the scope of the role

When writing a job description, you should first understand the basic scope to accurately identify the need for the role. This will not only help you attract the right candidates but will also help your hiring manager narrow down the options more easily and provide a preliminary list of candidates faster.

It’s worth stressing that hiring managers should clearly communicate this information with the recruitment team. By doing so, they can circumvent delays in making the job posting and avoid interviewing misinformed or unqualified candidates.

2. Evaluate the candidates before the interview

One of the most important recruiting tips for hiring managers is to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of each candidate’s information before the interview process begins. We understand that sometimes it’s too hard to even get enough candidates for a role. However, interviewing candidates who obviously aren’t a fit will just waste time for everyone involved. 

We recommend carefully sifting through the information provided by the candidate and taking note of any missing skills or qualifications. 

In addition, you can make sure that the candidate is a personal and cultural fit by checking out their social media profiles. This may seem intrusive, but with the rise of social media platforms, it’s slowly becoming a common practice. 

3. Improve the interview

Your company may have a positive reputation, but the candidate (especially the one who is the real deal) will judge it based on the quality of the interview. 

First, professional image and punctuality are important. You should also strive to make a connection with the person you’re interviewing. Create a comfortable atmosphere by greeting them with a warm welcome, offering a beverage, and breaking the ice with a few jokes - something that will do wonders for establishing rapport with the applicant. 

Next, consider the quality of your questions. Some queries are used by almost every hiring manager and don’t offer any insight into the quality of a candidate. For example, open-ended questions about conflicts at a previous workplace don’t reveal anything about the candidate’s soft skills. It’s even worse with cliche questions such as “Tell me about yourself” which may look effective on the surface but rarely yield an answer even remotely relevant to the position.

You should also be prepared to answer your candidates’ questions. Because of the current labor shortage, applicants (particularly highly qualified ones) are using the interview as a way to gauge if your company is the right fit for them too. 

As such, you can expect to hear questions like:

• What are my options for growth within your company?
• What are the perks you offer?
• What are your expectations for your employees?
• How does your company conduct a performance review?
• Why is this position open?

Have an answer ready beforehand for all of these questions as they are bound to pop up when interviewing highly-specialized candidates.

Once the interviews are complete, you’ll have a better insight into the aspirations, motivations, and personalities of the people who applied for the position. Thus, you’ll be able to better understand which of these individuals will thrive in your organization and which ones are a waste of time. 

4. Review all candidates with your team

Although we are talking mostly about recruiting tips for hiring managers, the entire hiring team should review all applications, including the supervisor for the position, HR representatives, and the recruiters. 

You can take it a step further by asking employees who will closely interact with the person you hire for their input. After all, these team members will be the ones working with the “new guy” regularly, so their opinion absolutely matters.

5. Respond to candidates quickly

If you leave your candidates hanging for weeks without following up, you run the risk of them choosing another company simply because your competitor got to them first. Also, waiting for weeks to hear back from a company is agonizing so try to be as quick as possible when responding to candidates. 

How fast should you respond?

We recommend following up within a week or if you’ve interviewed a lot of applicants, within a two-week window.

6. Provide valuable feedback when rejecting a candidate

When rejecting candidates, be straightforward. This means you should avoid writing paragraphs about how amazing they are, only to reject them at the end. 

A good way to write a rejection letter is to be direct, polite, and offer them a clear reason why you chose someone else. Feel free to provide them suggestions on areas they can improve that may help them land a similar position in the future. 

If done well, the candidate will walk away feeling motivated without harboring any will against your company. 

Snag that Perfect Candidate Now

You can use these recruiting tips for hiring managers to see improvement in your overall hiring process. If you implement all of the suggestions during your next hiring cycle, you’ll have no trouble streamlining your hiring process and eliminating most of the challenges associated with attracting and interviewing new candidates. 

Still, it’s worth noting that this is a multi-step process that requires coordination between the teams, and the hiring manager is just one piece of the entire puzzle. So unfortunately, this article may not resonate with you if you’re understaffed and have no dedicated hiring team. If you don’t have the resources, your best course of action is to reach out to a staffing agency.

Here at Griffin Global, we not only connect businesses with highly qualified candidates, but our decades of experience allow us to take over your entire staffing workflow and offer hands-on guidance during each step of the process. For instance, we can help with job postings, conduct preliminary interviews, evaluate the qualifications of all the candidates, and everything in between. 

The best thing is that our services will cost you less than hiring someone in-house, so if you’re working within budgetary restrictions, a staffing agency is the way to go.

Hit us a message through our contact form or call (855) 747-4334 and take the leap toward fulfilling your staffing goals with ease.