Ever wondered why some companies are more successful than others? Is it their products? Is it their marketing or branding? Do the more successful organizations have more financial resources? No, it’s always the workforce of a company which makes or breaks the success of a company! Human talent is therefore the world’s most sought-after commodity and the process of searching and attracting this commodity is at the heart of every organization.
For any organization, regardless of the size and field, the ability to recruit a qualified workforce is crucial. As an organization’s workforce typically drivesthe organization’s productivity, the organization’s level of performance and competitive advantage is largely dependent on the quality of its workforce. Today, the fact is that every company is looking for high-potential, high-quality employees in scarce pools of talent.
The crucial role of the line manager
What’s interesting is that most companies nowadays still rely on HR and recruiting managers to deliver them the best possible candidates. You won’t find a lot of commentary out there about the hiring manager’s role in this process. Worse yet, to some degree, is that we’ve led hiring managers to believe that recruiting talent is a function of HR. It’s not! It’s quite simply one of the most important activities leaders do. Looking at today’s practices of most organisations, it becomes clear that line managers are not sufficiently involved in the interview process. This is despite HR professionals agreeing that it is crucial that line managers meet
and assess prospective members of their team, in order to ensure candidates, have a good fit with the job requirements and culture of the company. In their eyes, the role of the line manager is therefore crucial for preventing ‘misfits’.
Out-dated ATS pricing prevents hiring collaboration
Most ATS / recruitment systems however are discouraging recruiters and line managers to work together in the recruitment process by adopting a pricing model where an organisation pays additional license fees for every extra log-in created. As a result, there are only a few organisations in which all line managers have a log-in for the recruitment system and are actively collaborating with recruiters managing candidates.
This will probably change in the near future. Hiring has become a team sport and it’s critical to get all the relevant team members involved for a more efficient and cost-effective hiring process. And in the war for talent, without question, line managers are the key to hiring success and should always be part of the hiring team.
Team-based recruitment
Top performing organizations should start looking for recruitment software that allow multiple users on one license to ensure team-based recruiting and hiring collaboration in addition to applicant tracking. The advantages are clear: when both HR/recruiters and line managers have the ability to work together on the same cloud-based system, they can easily access content, communicate together, make notes, leave comments and easily rate candidates on both hard and soft skills with the help of online questionnaires and interview scoring cards. Eventually, when everybody can get a free login to the recruitment system, the hiring collaboration between HR and line managers (and even employees) will increase dramatically resulting in an improved quality of hire. Organizations should adopt the philosophy of “Everybody is a recruiter!” and assure themselves of the right talents for the future by implementing a team-based recruitment process.
