External help especially via a good executive search agency can help you with your hiring requirements by ideating a search strategy after understand your talent requirements. They often lay the groundwork for hiring managers and internal talent acquisition. A good one will not be just an extension of your arms and legs in the search for talents but they become the salespeople pitching your opportunities, presenting your EVPs, and closing it with your selected talent.
While it's all good, hiring managers or internal recruiters sometimes rely on it so much that they forget the simple fact that these candidates will work with them and not with the agency’s team. Ultimately, the successful candidate will join the hiring manager's team. They also need to present the career opportunity, and make it an attractive proposition to those candidates too. Some even forget that their engagement with the candidate can make or break the candidate's interest in moving ahead with the process. Prospective employers should do well to remember that in hiring, evaluation goes both ways, and more often than not, the quality of engagement from the interviewers ultimately affects candidates' decision-making process.
What are some basic things to note that internal TAs or hiring managers can do to engage their candidates positively?
- Do not assume that the agency has explained the opportunity well enough to the candidate. There might be vital information that the external recruiter might not know of. It would help to do a run-through and check what the candidates think about the opportunity.
- Come prepared for the interview with the intention of evaluating and attracting great talents. There is a fine line between being confident and arrogant; thread it carefully.
- Get your act together; there is nothing more disappointing for a candidate than to be interviewed for a dream role with a dream employer only to find a messy and thoughtless hiring process.
- Be friendly but still be professional.
- If they are way out of your budget from the get-go, do not make candidates go through countless rounds only to find out the role is not going to pay their expectations.
Sometimes, poor engagement happens not because of anyone's fault but purely circumstantial. Most hiring managers or internal TAs have a lot on their plate, especially for growing companies and teams. In these situations, teamwork and being in sync with everyone makes a difference so as not to deviate from and neglect great candidate experience entirely.
There is nothing that can’t be worked out with proper and open lines of communication; just like what I said earlier, it takes a village to hire talents.