Tech Recruitment Mistakes - Multiple Points of Contact

During the recruitment process, it’s typical that you will have more than one stakeholder during the process. This can be important for your internal decision making but when you are dealing with a recruiter or an agency it can often be confusing for them and can often lead to conflicting information if you have multiple people to contact or listen to. This often leads many businesses having two sometimes three people the recruiter needs to talk with to get things done - Hiring Manager, HR, CEOs, PAs, etc. This really does not streamline a process if anything it starts to act as a bottleneck. Especially if one of those people is away on holiday, unreachable or just too busy.

Whoever is in charge of the team and who feels the most pain of not having the position filled should be the main point of contact with the recruiter to do the following; Give the briefing on the position, be the sole person to send CV’s to make decisions on whether or not to interview, receive and inform of feedback & discuss offers with. I do also believe recruiting is a team sport but you have to have a clear decision-maker who is directly heading up this team to liaise with the recruiter. If there are other people to be informed, just do that. Tell your recruiter who needs to see what information and ask them to copy in anyone with the relevant info. Selecting anyone else in a different department to do this will most likely lead to a lack of information that can cause the recruiter to miss-understand exactly what you are looking for / what is happening. The problem often occurs when HR block recruiters from speaking to hiring managers (I do not understand why this happens as you are trying to help the manager and not being able to speak to them makes your job pretty impossible as a recruiter). If your process is purely driven by HR then stop hiding information from the recruiter, share it. Involve the recruiter with all internal communication as it will help them help you. A great tool for this is Workable as it keeps all the communication in one place and informs everyone who needs to be informed. If you are not using an ATS already, use this one as in my personal opinion it's the best one out there for working with recruiters.

Steve Jobs was a master at this. He was directly involved with hiring his direct team.

The success of your business absolutely depends on the people in it and is why the recruitment of your team and being directly involved with it should be your utmost importance as a leader. A good product or service will always just be that; a product or service. Without the great people behind it, it will never be anything more than that. To get those people you need to have a recruitment process that is remarkable and works with you to be as streamlined as possible. People buy people so the earlier you can be in direct contact with the candidate the better. The more people involved that will not directly be working with that person the more I can guarantee the longer it will take and more people you will lose in your process because of it.

You may be thinking that works fine but what happens when you yourself are out the office for a few days or away on vacation?

If you do not want to slow your recruitment down or risk losing some of the good candidates you have in the process already tell your recruiter well in advance of planned holidays or business trips, this way you can both work around the dates to make sure you don’t have people in the process around that time or that you both know you should look at closing up existing processes around a certain time and not to start any new ones. The worst thing a candidate can hear is part-way through the process is ‘the manager has gone on holiday for 2 weeks, so we have to put this on hold and pick this up when he/she is back’ What right-minded A-player candidate is going to wait around for that long and secondly imagine how that makes them feel. It certainly doesn’t fill them with confidence that you are really interested in hiring them. If there is an on-going requirement and you cannot afford to stop or pause the recruitment then I would suggest bringing in who-ever is your second in command for this position, someone who also feels the pain of not having this position filled as you want to ensure the importance of getting hiring done will still happen in your absence. It should also be someone you trust to make a judgement call on your behalf and the authority to say yes to the candidate to be able to make the offer. It’s pointless getting them to step in giving them this responsibility and then get all the way to the end of the process to them still wait for you to give the green light to hire them. 

Overall, have a clear idea of who is in charge of what and share all the information possible with your recruiter so that they can help you.

By Paul Turner - Director / Co-Founder - DigiTech Search