Supervisor's Guide: Hiring

Role of Supervisor

A supervisor’s main role in managing the recruitment and selection of staff is to:

  • Be knowledgeable about the laws and regulations that provide protection from unfair hiring practices
  • Understand the legal and practical aspects of preparing for staff recruitment.

Leading Practices for Highly Effective Staff Recruitment

  1. Planning. Often urgency to recruit translates into a lack of planning. This can lead to poorer outcomes in recruiting if proper consideration has not been given to organizational design, leadership team alignment, competencies, etc.
  2. Three-way meeting. A current, well documented job description is an important starting point. But, a meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter, and HR Business Partner is critical in order to determine what the optimal profile is, discuss the current labor market, review any anticipated obstacles, and provide needed perspective for the recruiter on career paths, selling points of the position, experience, or history of the hiring manager.
  3. Help your recruiter learn what “good” looks like. The recruiter’s role is to minimize the amount of time that it takes a hiring manager to recruit, source, and screen high-quality talent. In order to do this, the hiring manager needs to make an upfront investment to ensure that the recruiter understands what “great” looks like. Aside from the three-way meeting, this includes some simple but important steps, such as talking about the profiles of some of the best people in the department or, if possible, meeting with some of those top performers on the team to learn more about what makes them great. The more this is done, the better the recruiter should be able to deliver the right talent to the hiring manager.
  4. Avoid the Common Pitfalls.
  • Changes to what’s originally laid out for the job. A lot of the work in recruiting is done during the first two to four weeks of the recruiting cycle. It’s when recruiters work hardest to source and screen talent. Any changes a hiring manager makes after the three-way meeting described above creates a lot of wasted effort for recruiting.
  • The industry-experience trap. Industry experience is not only highly overrated, but it’s also the quickest way to sub-optimize the recruited talent. Do not let biases for or against specific types of industry experience or background prevent consideration of talent. The fact is that for the majority of our jobs, top talent with high learning agility can learn the nuances of higher education, but higher education-experienced candidates who do not possess high learning agility may never become top talent or future leaders.
  • The most important metric isn’t time-to-fill. When asked about recruiting metrics, the one most hiring managers mention is time-to-fill. Rather than focusing on time- to- fill, hold recruiters to the highest standards for quality and diversity. A year from now, you probably won’t remember whether it took seven or 10 weeks to fill that job, but you’ll live with the quality of the hire for a long time.
  1. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. By now, it’s clear that recruiting really is collaboration among the hiring manager, HR Business Partner, and recruiter. To ensure that the partnership is most effective, communication needs to be ongoing and in-depth. At a minimum, a weekly update meeting should take place beginning within two to three weeks from the project initiation.
  2. Removing Roadblocks
  • Time is the enemy. For recruiters, this is a given. The best talents have many options in the marketplace, and they’re not going to wait for lengthy interview cycles or cumbersome decision-making processes.
  • Make sure interview teams are all reading from the same page, and determine who makes the hiring decision. Using multiple interviewers can increase the quality of the hiring decision. But, it’s critical to ensure that all interviewers are all in agreement as to what the hiring profile is, and that they send a consistent message to the candidate on the position, company, and culture. Also, if you have seven interviewers, get all of their input – but don’t set the expectations that all seven have to endorse the hire.
  1. Selling the opportunity. Remember that the best candidates are also interviewing us. They’re assessing how we measure up to their expectations in relation to the job, the vision and the caliber of our leadership, the quality of our hiring manager and of their peers, compensation, benefits, career path, and culture. As a result, everyone that participates in the interviewing process should devote some time to addressing these topics, selling the opportunity, and ensuring that the candidate experience is a good one for the interviewee.