What Recruiters Think of Hiring Managers Right Now

Last week in The Pinnacle Newsletter Blog, we discussed what recruiters think of each other in this current market. We received some help from our 2019 State of the Recruiting Industry Survey, which we conducted earlier this year. (We’ll be publishing the full report in the near future.)

In the meantime, though, we’ve going to “tease” the full report by releasing some of the contents of said report. This week, those contents deal with what recruiters think of hiring managers.

In this type of economic environment, one in which we’re at the end of a bull market and candidates have the leverage, a certain patterns emerges. This pattern includes hiring managers who can’t quite “wrap their brains” around current market conditions.

This becomes a problem because, as you’ll see, when hiring managers aren’t full grasping the conditions, they can’t move quickly enough to hire top candidates. Because top candidates have more options. And they have no qualms about exploring those options in rapid-fire succession.

Hiring managers: in the spotlight

We asked multiple questions about clients and/or hiring managers. As you might expect, we received a lot of feedback regarding those questions.

And although every question in the survey was of the multiple-choice variety, we also gave recruiters the opportunity to leave their comments. They were not shy about leaving their comments.

“Hiring managers want multiple candidates for consideration vs. timely acting on great candidates that available. Passive candidates that become active have multiple opportunities. Company that treats them the best with a timely offer wins.”

“It’s a combination of not making the offer timely enough and also not making strong enough offers- the candidates don’t want to move for a 2-3% bump.”

“Timely and relevant feedback continues to be an issues, especially with clients who change the job order.”

“Clients are often doing three steps in the interview process which slows things down and then we can loose the best candidates.”

“In most cases, the candidate is the more excited part of the equation and when clients drag their feet on giving feedback it puts the recruiter in a pickle. And then you wait…”

“Dragging things on and on. No sense of urgency, [with] weeks separating the interviews, etc.”

“Third-party vendor management companies trying to act as a firewall between hiring managers and us. They don’t want us having a conversation with each other. It is crazy and it doesn’t work.”

“We still have clients ‘ghosting’ us and either taking too long to extend an offer, hoping for the 100% perfect match, and when they finally pull the trigger, the candidate is no longer available. Then the client says, ‘That’s okay, find us another one like him/her,’ which we don’t do as a contingency firm because we lost that placement and we do not want to put ourselves in that position again.”

Lest you think, though, that all clients are causing problems for their recruiters, there are those who answered along this vein:

“My clients are awesome . . . I don’t have these problems with them.”

Yes, employers are willing to hire. Sure, clients are willing to give job orders to recruiters. But that doesn’t mean everything is both hunky and dory.

There are still problems and there is still a certain level of friction between recruiters and hiring managers. And regardless of how good the economy and the marketplace are, that will probably always be the case.