From: Hiring Manager

To: Corporate Recruiter

Date: April 10, 2010

Subject: How to work with your hiring manager to hire great people!

Thank you for your memo that I read with great interest. I appreciate the work you do to help
me hire great people when I need them. Your thoughts are taken in the spirit they
were intended and I’ll do my best to work with you as suggested. Here are some
thoughts of mine that will help our work together to be even more effective.

• The single biggest challenge that I face is that there never seems to be enough time to focus on staffing. Most of my time is spent managing my existing team, dealing with my “real” work, meetings, fighting fires, and responding to the requests of my boss. It’s difficult for me to focus on staffing when I have many urgent things to take care of “right now”. Please understand that if I don’t respond to your requests quickly, it probably means that I’m working on something that is more pressing to me.
• It works best for me if you send just a few truly on-target resumes for me to review. I don’t have the band-width to review 10’s of resumes for each position. Just pick the best ones and I’ll respond to those.
• If you’re not sure what I’m looking for, please read the requisition and do some research before calling me. I’m happy to clarify anything you need but not if you haven’t done the groundwork.
• I truly value your detailed phone interview notes. When I read those and consider the resume, I’m in a much better position to choose what action to take. Thanks for taking the time to find out more about the candidates.
• We all can get bogged down with administrivia. It’s great when you work out the details and give clear instructions to your administrator and mine so that everyone can be on the same page. For example, if everyone is informed when we’re scheduling interviews we have the opportunity to catch errors and make changes before the candidate shows up on our doorstep.
• I rely on you to give me a solid review of each candidate we interview, to know what they really want to do, their compensation history, their compensation requirements, where else they are interviewing, and everything else that will affect our ability to hire the people we want to hire.
• Part of your job is to close candidates. I pay particular attention to your offer to hire ratio. I know that you aren’t in complete control of whether or not a candidate accepts our offer but you are the person who has the most control on our side of the equation. If we’re not hiring the people we want then I have to question your effectiveness.
• It’s important to me that you work well with my team including my boss. Your job isn’t to bully people into taking the action you want them to take. Your job is to forge strong relationships with the internal team and to influence behavior so that we can hire the people we want.
• Please always ask yourself what you can do to forward the action. Don’t sit on your hands because I didn’t get back to you on a stellar resume. Find another way to prompt me to act. Sometimes email is best but other times I’ll respond better to a phone call, instant message, or you showing up at my door at a convenient time.
• I value the weekly status report you send me. It’s great to have a clear one-page summary of all my open requisitions, when they opened,
  and the status of each candidate currently in-play. I like that everyone on the
  team is copied. It’s a tool I use to hold my team to account.
• Please know that our business situation is extremely fluid. Our urgent needs today may not be urgent or even needs at all tomorrow. Please try to anticipate our needs. The closer relationships you have with my team the more likely it is that you’ll know what is going on and what changes are expected. Don’t rely on me to provide all that information. Find as many sources as you can. I’m available to validate any information that you believe is critical.
• Sometimes HR can be so process and policy driven that it drives me nuts. I know that there are certain requirements to do your job. Please do everything you can to insulate my team and me from any busy work. Can you please just take care of it for us?
• If you see bottlenecks, problems, wasted efforts, or inefficiencies in our hiring process, please either just take care of them or have whatever conversations are necessary to clean them up. None of us has time to waste on unproductive activities. Just don’t “bitch” about them to others. That doesn’t help anyone.
• As you know, my boss can be challenging at times. I’d certainly appreciate it if you didn’t complain to her about any of my shortcomings. Just come and talk to me if you have concerns and we’ll work it out. I guess that means that I’d better not complain to your boss about you.

I truly appreciate the support you give us.

Thanks,

Your Hiring Manager