One simple trick to figure out what hiring manager(really) wants

One of the most fuzzy parts of a recruiter’s life is a meeting with hiring manager and recruitment team to understand the candidate requirements, team dynamics and defining the contour of the best person for the team. The hiring managers don’t always know whom they want to hire and there is always a discrepancy about what is it exactly do they want and how far can they compromise on the perfect candidate. It is also about expectations management. Quite often hiring managers want a unicorn but all data points to the fact that a stallion would do the job and unicorn will never be found.

After interviewing a few best of the breed recruiters and from my own experience, we came up with a list of things one should do in the intake meeting. The purpose is to create a framework where it can help you, your team of sourcers and recruiters as well as hiring managers to come on the same page and hire the best candidate is the shortest time.

How to effectively profile the desired candidate?

In the intake meeting, it is your job to ask questions that helps hiring manager to spell out the desired candidate profile more efficiently. The mistake most of us make is to start with the questions like

• How many years of experience should the candidate have?
• What should be education/experience pedigree?
• Salary structure?
• What are the essential and good to have skills in the candidate?
• A general idea about the team and the culture

This is a wrong starting point. Ofcourse all of this information is important. But, asking these questions directly, leaves the room for ambiguity and also limits your understanding of the role and more importantly the true expectations of hiring managers. Here’s how the best recruiters take the intake meeting.

Probe about the work not the keywords:

Pros don’t jump to keywords. They rather ask the hiring managers the real work profile. What will the hired candidate do everyday. What would be performance metrics and what is expected out of them.

Instead they ask: What would the hired candidate achieve in 30 days, 90 days and 360 days?

This gives you a much better idea of who the ideal candidate is for the job, not the hiring manager’s idea of ideal candidate for the job. The answer to this question will tell you what would it take for the candidate to do the job.

Ask about the people they will work with and not cultural values:

Culture is really really hard to define. Most people define culture as a set of words, or a bunch of vague statements like “We like to have fun at work” etc etc you know the drill. If you really want to understand and communicate about a company’s culture and where the candidate would fit in, ask about the people they will be working with. Instead of asking about culture, pros ask about people.

Who would be the teammates candidate would be working with and what makes them unique in the team?

Following this, you should discuss expected experience, salary range and cultural aspects of the team.

So here’s a simple questionairre that you should fill out with the hiring manager before you take out your sourcing chops and start reaching out to candidates.

• What should the ideal candidate will achieve in 30 days, 90 days and 360 days?
• What will be the careers development path for the ideal candidate in the organisation in next 3–5 years?
• What is the compensation structure?
• What are the likely organisations where the ideal candidate currently works?
• What are the skills that candidate should have and what should have they achieved?

Answer to these questions will lead you to candidate persona and you can create a candidate persona based on this template, share it with the team and start sourcing.

Sample intake form

For an exercise, I am sharing a sample form with you. Let’s try it for a UX Design Lead you are trying to hire.

What should the ideal candidate will achieve in 30 days, 90 days and 360 days?

• The ideal candidate would understand the current design process and will be completely integrated with product, design and engineering teams.
• Candidate would grasp the current design language and how we see it evolving in the future.
• You will collaborate with the product marketing team to push one campaign out of the door and be in the creative control of the campaign

What should the ideal candidate achieve in 90 days?

• Conduct 1on1 meetings with the design team
• Take charge of Performance Reviews and OKRs of your team
• Represent UX team in weekly all hands meetings.
• Create a plan to evolve our design language for next 3 years

What would the ideal candidate achieve in 360 days?

• A new and improved design language is ready for the product, marketing and everything in between
• UX team has evolved and grown to 8 members and you keep your hiring pipeline healthy and churning
• You have developed a clear design evolution plan and have an execution strategy in place
• You are a member of internal product team that takes charge of final product decisions

It’s as simple as that. We would love to know if you have any hacks you employ to figure out what hiring managers (really) want.

Originally published on Recruiterflow blog