As a recruiter, you know that when you’re out of sync with your hiring manager (HM), you ultimately only create more work for the both of you. Candidate experience suffers—which impacts the company’s brand, its inbound applications and passive outreach efforts, and its overall hiring success.
Poor communication, miscommunication, and misunderstanding each others’ roles in the hiring process are among the top factors complicating the recruiter/hiring manager relationship. One of the most common of those miscommunications occurs at the very beginning of a req—during the kickoff meeting—because hiring managers don’t always know exactly how to communicate their talent needs.
It wasn’t so long ago that 77% of hiring managers said they believed recruiters’ candidate screening processes were “inadequate,” while 51% of those same recruiters said hiring managers needed to do a better job of communicating what they looked for in a candidate. And while 80% of recruiters claimed to have a strong understanding of the roles for which they recruited, 61% of hiring managers thought otherwise.
That’s why a thorough kickoff meeting is crucial to any good hire. When hiring managers aren’t asked to articulate in detail what they’re looking for, they won’t be satisfied with the quality of candidates sent their way—which sends you, recruiter, back to the drawing board. So insist on a face-to-face conversation rather than an email or a req hand-off. A well-run kickoff meeting allows you to cover the bases. It demands that your HM think the role through and get clarity on what they need. Which makes you 3x more likely to reduce time-to-hire and 2x more likely to improve quality-of-hire.
You may already know the answers to some of the questions below (though some are worth asking anyway—you may learn something new and surprising from your HM’s perspective); and you may not have time to get through all of them in a single meeting. We tried to be as comprehensive as possible here, which in some cases meant asking the same question a few different ways.
You know your hiring managers best; so take the questions that feel most valuable to you into the kickoff meeting. Consider forwarding a few questions to your HM ahead of time… but don’t overload them! Send on the ones that may require some time to sit with. Over time, they’ll know what kinds of questions to prepare for—and you may have to ask fewer of them, because you’ll know the manager, the team, its moving parts, and its culture so well.
Dig into the details if the role is a backfill. Does the HM want to replicate a terrific employee they’re sorry to lose; or did the last employee clarify for them what doesn’t work? What did the person who occupied the role most recently teach them about the kind of person who thrives—or who doesn’t—in this role?
Focusing on the pain points the role will solve and the opportunities it will take advantage of will help clarify purpose and impact, which is great information for your elevator pitch.
“In-a-sentence-or-two” questions require that the HM pare down the role to its most important elements and arm you with succinct information to relay to candidates. They might sound silly or unsophisticated; but you’ll likely learn something new each time you ask them.
Other ways of asking this to ensure the HM understands what “required” means: What skills immediately disqualify someone if they’re not on a resume—no matter what else the resume says? What skills are absolutely indispensable to the candidate’s being able to do the job?
Don’t underestimate the power of “why” for clarification.
This is another way of asking what trade-offs the HM would ultimately be willing to make. It’s important to know whether your HM would prefer to take a chance on someone with great potential to grow into the role and risk having to let them go, or only hire someone with out-of-the-box experience and risk losing out on potentially great talent and faster time-to-hire. Note: have the HM look at current top performers on their team. They likely weren’t all purple squirrels. What core skills did they arrive with and what skills do they possess now only through experience at your org?
Questions about how the position will support the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic goals will help you get a better sense of the role’s “greater purpose,” which you can also work into your elevator pitch.
Consider jumping on a chat with the top-performing employees your HM mentions to see if you can gather what skills, traits, and characteristics make them so successful. Is it curiosity? Grit? Rigor? Ability to take ownership? Orientation toward teamwork? They probably know what makes them so good in their roles. Don’t be afraid to openly ask them.
Note that you may have to adjust your time-to-hire to meet team or departmental diversity goals. From both a business perspective and a values perspective, it’ll be well worth the adjustment.
Asking about what makes employees unique will remind both you and your HM of the importance of thinking about “culture add” rather than “culture fit” (which can often end up looking like homogeneity). Think of personalities and attributes that will compliment what’s already on the team, not replicate it.
This is essentially where you ask the HM to sell you the role. You probably already know your org’s employee value proposition; but here you get to hear a particular experience of what it means and looks like.
This question is a reminder that your HM probably has their own very robust network of talent they know but haven’t thought to approach. Offer to reach out to those leads and initiate a conversation if they’d prefer you do so.
Of course, introduce these profiles at any point in the conversation. (If you haven’t brought any with you and there’s time, you and your HM could run a quick sourcing session on LinkedIn together, discussing the talent that surfaces.) Going through profiles “live” with your HM is an invaluable practice. It shows them what top-of-funnel sourcing looks like; and it gives you instant feedback based on body language and facial expressions—even if you’re doing this exercise virtually.
Collectively, these questions will give you and your hiring manager a holistic view of their ideal candidate persona. If you’re looking to learn more about how to run a strong kickoff meeting—including how to prepare for the session and the additional questions you shouldn't’ leave the meeting without getting answers to—take a look at Gem’s Recruiter/Hiring Manager Calibration Guide.
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