Overview:
Hiring managers have a huge role in recruiting. But when we talk about recruiting or HR technology, we tend to focus on candidates and the recruiter. What do hiring managers really want?
When hiring managers are unhappy with the recruiting process, why is that usually the case?
This is the question we need to start with.
Unhappy hiring managers usually come about because:
- Their time was wasted.
- Money from their budget was wasted.
- They were presented with unqualified candidates.
- Hiring managers feel like the recruiter didn’t have a good hold on what was needed, despite meetings and conversations before the search commenced.
- They lacked enough information on the candidates to make informed decisions about round advancement.
- The recruiter notes were sloppy and low-context.
Those are some of the big buckets that derail relationships between hiring managers and recruiters, and those buckets apply in-house and out-of-house (i.e. agency). If you wanted to group the above into 1-2 big buckets, those would probably be “communication” and “collaboration,” with a potential 2A bucket of “technical knowledge/expertise.”
We have covered off on a lot of these topics over the last year or so; we actually just recently talked about how recruiter notes need to be put out to pasture. One of the first problems we ever identified in our own recruiting careers was the drop in technical recruiting; if recruiters don’t know the terms, acronyms, coding languages, tech stacks, and more … they cannot do effective interviews, and the information they flow back to the hiring manager is usually insufficient. The ability to supercharge technical recruiting is one reason we built HoneIt.
And time is obviously the major finite resource of our lives. We can’t get it back. A bunch of 45-minute phone screens? Because “that’s the way we do things” or “We’ll know when we know?” What about replacing those with a few 5-minute screens of key answers?
The weird spot that HR Tech resides in
HR Tech, of which recruiting tech is a subset, resides at a really weird spot in the business ecosystem. It’s often designed by people who had some experience in HR/recruiting earlier in their career, and as such, some of the pain points and features are pointed at the recruiter. Logical! But the problem is two-fold:
- The hiring manager is a massively important part of the hiring process too, and oftentimes the tech doesn’t take his/her needs into account when it’s built.
- Hiring managers and executives are usually who buys HR Tech, because HR doesn’t have spend in many organizations … so then the builders of the tech are trying to sell to an audience that isn’t always the focus of the plan.
Weird stuff, eh? We can all do better.
What do hiring managers need out of recruiting technology?
The basic list:
- An ability to easily compare answers to standard questions from different candidates
- A way to collaborate with the recruiter on who to advance, scheduling, and more
- {nice to have/need to have in some ways} A way to reduce bias in the selection/advancement process
- A way to save money and time
- An ability to “CYA” a recruiter with less technical knowledge for a more technical role
Why do hiring managers love Honeit?
- It’s optimized for hiring manager experience: We knew hiring managers needed to love and appreciate the tech for it to be adopted at scale inside an org, so we built it in part with hiring managers in mind.
- Honeit saves hiring managers time: Imagine you have to do a 45-minute interview with a candidate who might not be qualified. That’s a giant waste of time for you. But what if you could get a “Meet The Candidate” link and spend 5-6 minutes going over their responses to the questions you care most about? You just saved about 35-40 minutes per candidate screen on your end, which could add up to 10-12 hours/week. Imagine what you could do in the rest of the business.
- Honeit saves you money: We saved one company $310,000 in the first six weeks of having open roles.
- The tech: Our tech allows for searching by question, answers, using tags, etc. You can directly compare active candidates and rediscover old candidates for new open roles.
- Makes scheduling easier: We’ve been called — and we’re proud of this — “Calendly on steroids.”
- Collaborations with the recruiter: We have a dozen or so, including Slack, which makes it easier for the hiring manager and the recruiter to touch base about specific candidates or next process steps.
- Remote hiring: We make remote hiring (standard right now) a lot easier.
- We help combat bias: Bias cannot be totally eliminated — humans are subjective — but there are tools and approaches you can use to reduce bias in early-stage hiring.
- Honeit also offers video, but it’s two-way: One-way video tools, which flooded the market for 3-5 years, don’t give much context or clarity to a hiring manager. Two-way tools, i.e. actual conversations on video, provide much more insight.
- You’re supposed to be data-driven, right? That’s the new focus of most organizations. Well, interviews are data. We call them “conversational intelligence” sometimes. It’s a complete waste to have six people, representing $500,000+ in salary, spend 45-minute, 1-hour calls with candidates and not have any of those conversations recorded as “data” to capture. What about repeat questions? What about comparing responses to similar questions across interviews? Interviews are data. If you want superstar hires, you need to think of interviews that way, not just a ‘thing that has to be done.”
To learn more about how HoneIt works, contact us.
