Are you talking to your recruiting teams to see how they feel the client relationship is going?
Once a month we ask the recruiters to list out all the hiring managers that they have worked with in that month. Then we ask them to rate the relationship with that manager. The recruiter then rates the relationship based off communications they have had with the manager. We make this fun by using emoji faces that represent the level of satisfaction that the hiring manager is feeling based on how the recruiter feels about the relationship. The hiring managers don’t participate in these surveys that we do monthly but are surveyed quarterly. We rate the satisfaction level in four categories: unhappy, neutral, happy, and advocate.
The goal is always to get the managers to advocate, however if the existing perception of recruiting was or is negative before we partnered with this client, it may take some trust to get to that point. The purpose of the report is to understand your hiring managers and how to best service them. Once we identify the level of satisfaction, then we can strategize on how get each hiring manager to an advocate. The end goal is to have advocates across the board! Once we have the satisfaction levels established, we implement a strategy based off what we know about the manager to get them to that advocate level. This strategy will look different for each hiring manager because each manager will have different things that are important to them and add value to their experience in the service provided. For most managers it’s just a matter of getting them great candidates, for others it’s being responsive and getting the hiring managers answers quickly and accurately. There are some managers that will take more than great service to get them to be an advocate, but if you know what will make them happy then you can chip away at it slowly and establish the trust needed to convert them over to the advocate side!
In RPO, we work with man clients and can have hundreds of hiring managers that we deal with on a monthly basis, so these reports can be overwhelming for recruiters the first few times we do them. However, once the recruiters see their managers are starting to become advocates it all become time well spent and recruiting becomes a lot more efficient and enjoyable for everyone. It is not always easy to get all your hiring managers to become advocates but with time, hard work, and great candidates we always get there.
By Lindsey Roundtree | People Science Director of Client Services
