5 Biggest Lessons I Learned From My Smartest Hiring Managers | with John Vlastelica

Foreign. Welcome to the show. It's this week's Shortlist with myself, your host, Johnny Campbell, CEO and co Founder of Social Talent. And today as we're recording, this show is the 20th of January 2021. It is Inauguration Day in the US the day that the US welcomes in a new president. This kicks off as we're recording in about 30 minutes. So midway through our show, the initial speeches and if you're watching live, don't worry, we'll be all done before the actual inauguration happens. You can go watch it if you're listening to the podcast. It all happened. The big news happened, whatever the big news is. And for those of you in the talent world, you'll be glad to see in the last couple of hours that it's come out that one of the first things the President Elect Biden is planning to do is to revoke one of the executive orders related to our industry that Trump instituted back in October related to diversity and inclusion training, which spooked many of you in the US who are federal contractors and made you question whether you could roll out certain diversity and inclusion training initiatives. Well, the Biden administration has promised to revoke that today. So that's good news for all of us in the talent industry. Better news for you though, those of you listening live and listening to Podcast is is who we have as our guest today. Before I introduce our guests and talk about today's topic, I want to quickly remind you that you can find a kind of track list of all of our previous shows and you can preview our upcoming shows on the social talent website@socialtalent.com theshortlist if you're listening to us live, we'd love to have your questions and comments. You can join us on the chat in YouTube or LinkedIn. If you're not listening to us live, any links we share here today will be in the show. Notes of the Podcast. We'll we'd love you to listen to the podcast if you don't already. For those of you on the podcast, welcome back. Don't forget to subscribe. We're available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you find your podcasts. So let's get stuck into today's show. Five Biggest Lessons I Learned From My Smartest Hiring Managers so anyone working in talent or talent acquisition understands the often frustrating relationship between the recruiters, the talent acquisition professionals, and the hiring managers working Whether you're a hiring manager, you've been hiring for a role and you've had to work with recruiting or your recruiter having to work with your client slash hiring manager. I've no doubt you have had frustration and there's been a disconnect over the years. Or maybe it's all the time. On today's special edition of the Shortlist. We're going to get stuck into it. We're going to skip the news. There's loads of news going on. You don't need me to remind you of it this week. Joining us today we have the fantastic John Vasilika. And John Vasilika is going to be sharing with us his five biggest lessons from the kind of the smartest hiring managers he's come across. And John, for those of you who listened to the show before, has been with us before. He's one of the most, he's the most popular contributor to the social talent platform. Our users and the organizations we work with love his insight. But John, tell our audience what makes you credible? What gives you the right to tell us about hiring managers and recruiters and the disconnects?

Yeah, thanks for having me, Johnny. You know, it's interesting. I want to actually spend time today talking more around, you know, positive aspects of great hiring managers. I think I get a bad rap sometime because I talk negatively about the, you know, recruiter hiring manager relationship. But I often talk about how we can make it better. But it can feel like this for a lot of folks. I'm a former head of talent acquisition. I headed up TA at Expedia and was the head of tech recruiting at Amazon years ago. But for 15 years now I've been leading recruiting toolbox and we do all kinds of consulting and training projects with companies. But half our business or more is focused on work that, you know, touches the kind of recruiter hiring manager relationship or specifically is around hiring manager capability building. So in addition to working as a practitioner with hundreds and hundreds of hiring managers in my career, we've also trained thousands and thousands of hiring managers, led focus groups with hiring managers from about 30 countries. So we've had the opportunity to work with world class organizations. They're really kind of give us insights into some common denominator characteristics of the very best hiring managers. And that's what I want to focus on today is really what some of the best hiring managers do differently and what I've learned as a TA practitioner from many of these great hiring managers.

So I'm glad we're going to focus on the positive. I'm sure you're familiar with a meme that's gone around over the years, John, and there's Loads of screenshots. Maybe many of our audience have tried it or you type into Google, you know, recruiters are. And it brings up a lot of stuff. Well, yes, they just for, just for shits and giggles, I typed in hiring managers are. What are the first two things that came up, do you think? John, if you've ever tried this, you probably know.

I imagine it was something negative, not positive. So tell me, what did you get?

All right, the first, the number one was hiring managers are stupid. Number two, hiring managers are too picky. Right. And it goes on. Right. It's actually not that bad, but they're the first two and it's disappointing. So you know, John, Absolutely. I think your background having been a practitioner is brilliant. You've lived and breathed this. Running a recruiting team I'm working with. The breath of companies you've had the experience with is fantastic. Getting really in depth on solving this problem. I think there's no one else in the world who's going to understand this more than you. Probably going to have more of those insights. So dying to hear your five insights. I'm sure our audience are. We've got a bunch of people joining us live. Quick shout out to Marion James, Katan Srinsva, Donal Ina and tons more who are listening live. Great to have you folks. Dying to hear your questions as well. But I really want to hear first of all from John. John, you five tell me number one, let's get stuck into it. What's the first kind of big, big lesson you've learned over the years?

You know, it's interesting, I'd like to say that this is something that I figured out on my own, but I really realized kind of the hard, real strategy and talent acquisition starts before that kickoff meeting, before that, that, you know, the wreck is opened. One of the things that, that I think I tried to do, like a lot of corporate recruiters is I tried to go into some conversations with hiring managers, you know, when, when they, they have the urgency to fill a wreck. And I want to start talking to them about strategy, you know, and that could be sourcing strategy, new, new interviewing strategy, new process, a new diversity focus. I want to try and cram all these things into what can feel like a 30 or 45 minute conversation. And one of the things that I learned from hiring managers, the ones that seem to be getting the best talent, kind of getting their unfair share of top talent, they were really open to engaging with me outside of that, outside of that conversation. And it became a real signal to me that the best hiring managers, the ones who are getting great talent, are actually thinking about recruiting all the time. And I know this, I know we talk about this always be recruiting. But what I learned, learned as kind of a young Jedi and my learning my craft was the hiring managers who were talking about recruiting even when they didn't have a rec open, you know, even even when they didn't have short term pain and urgency were the ones that were getting great talent. And from that I realized I needed to be doing a lot more work outside of that kickoff meeting. Even, you know, before I was a, you know, recruiting manager and recruiting leader, I was, I was a hands on recruiter and I would find myself working with leaders or leaders even pulling me in, who wanted to talk about how they could go after different kinds of talent or how they wanted to change their profile or how we wanted to maybe do something beyond what the compensation team data was saying around compensation and kind of market insights. And so they were kind of pulling me into this conversation. And I want to contrast that with the hiring managers that I would try to engage with as a recruiter in between openings, you know, when they didn't have short term pain, who would often say, no, I don't want to meet with you, I don't have an opening. Like, why would I spend time with you now? I don't have a need. You're here to fulfill my order. I don't have an order in queue, so why would we talk? And that became a signal to me of one of the big differences between great hiring managers and either average or ineffective hiring managers. Does that make sense, Johnny?

It does, right? But what do you do if you're a recruiter and you have a whole bunch of hiring managers who are in the latter camp? John. Right. They're just not interested in having a conversation. Is there a way, do you recommend any methods that can get them engaged, that can turn them into that preferable hiring manager? Who does want to have that conversation? How? Have you seen this work or does it work?

Yeah, it's interesting. You absolutely can, but I have to be honest. You really have to prove yourself. You have to earn the right to have these strategy conversations outside of rec openings to some degree. So, you know, most hiring managers, most business leaders are quite busy and the last thing they want is another HR meeting, right? So one of the ways that you make sure that you kind of earn that right to have this meeting outside the kickoff is that you're actually filling, you know, filling roles and partnership with them really effectively. You Want to be invited in. And so one of the things that I often say, you know, no pain, no change. If you have a hiring manager who does not feel like they need to change up their strategy, their process, their target candidate profiles, improve diversity, improve their clothes, right? Make a skinnier funnel. If they feel like everything is going really okay and they're not in any pain, I gotta be honest, it's gonna be really hard for you to insert yourself into an additional. What feels to them like an additional meeting? Like why would we meet? Why would we spend time. So what I recommend to recruiters who are trying to kind of elevate their role a bit to more of a talent advisor and to kind of earn that opportunity to kind of be more strategic and have meetings outside of the more tactical we got to get this rec filled role is you need to be listening for hiring managers that are in pain. Hiring managers that are in pain around diversity, around speed, around quality, something, and that's where you're going to get kind of pulled in a little more. And as you start to work with those hiring managers and kind of insert yourself in and say, hey hiring manager Johnny, you're in pain around diversity. I'm working with other hiring managers who are doing these kinds of things and are getting these kinds of results. Would you like to meet separately outside of this urgent need and talk about what we can do together to get you this kind of talent and connecting it back to the kind of social proof influencing technique like I know other hiring managers who are doing this, other hiring managers like you, and they're getting these results and you're getting these results. And if you want to see this kind of talent or you want this kind of speed, there's something different you need to do. And not doing it in a critical you suck kind of way. You're not, you're not criticizing the hiring manager. You're more just saying if you want this, you can't operate down here and I can help you do this, I can help you get there. Not just you, your capabilities, but your process, your strategy, whatever it might be. So that's, that's typically one of the ways to do it, is start with the people in pain and then once you help those people, you kind of take your lessons learned on a roadshow and you start to kind of insert yourself in with hiring manager who weren't pulling you in.

I guess analogy that comes to mind because it's one I deal with or have dealt with over the years in the investment world, kind of corporate investment World. The majority of deals done are done between parties who've engaged long before the deal process has started. You know, you'll find an investor. You know, when the investment process is on, lots of people come into play and usually the person who ends up doing the deal with the organization, who invests who, you know, who does, does the fundraiser, the VC money. They've been talking for years with that organization. They've got to know them. I guess you're kind of saying the same. They're really good. Hiring manager, recruiting relationship isn't just happening when the deal is on. You're building that outside the deal with, waiting for that to happen. Because they're the, they're the most successful relationships, not just in recruiting, probably in most transactions like that.

Yeah. And they're pulling you. I mean, the smart ones, you don't need to push yourself on them. You don't need to push strategy, push process as much. They're saying, I'm in pain, I want to do something about this. And some of the best hiring managers I've worked with, I got to be honest, it makes me quite nervous. But they've gone off and built their own strategies. Right. If we're not stepping up, if the hiring managers up here, I want to get amazing talent. And we are kind of in this transactional mode. If we're not elevating ourselves, if we're not rising to the occasion, they will go off and build their own. I have so many stories of hiring managers just kind of completely going off the rails and, you know, building their own shadow recruiting organization, starting their own university recruiting programs, creating some crazy process. But it's because they, they, they, they own it. They're like, they get the value of it. They value talent so much, they're not going to wait for us. So those are the ones you want to kind of grab onto those really great hiring managers and help guide them so they don't go totally crazy. Yeah.

I want to move you on to number two, because I think this is, this is one I so believe in. Before I do a quick one, just to remind everyone listening, you know, John's background, while you might hear it, American twang. John works with hiring managers and organizations all over the world. And what we're trying to advise you on today here, what John's trying to share is a universal, the universal kind of inputs. And we've got people listening today from Kildare, from Geneva, from Mumbai, Bangalore, Vienna, Dublin. So hello, everybody. This is hopefully a very universal, universal thing. Bring me on to number two, John Your second piece of advice that you've got from hiring managers or insight you have to share?

Yeah, this is something I hear HR folks talk about and recruiters talk about. But I think it really clicked for me when I heard hiring managers say it, which is, it's a quality, not quantity game. That recruiting is about quality. And when I, again, when I look back and think about those hiring managers that are most effective, the smartest, most effective hiring managers, they didn't just say stuff like this, they lived it. And it showed up in a bunch of different ways. It showed up in a. I don't actually want to see 30 resumes from you, John. I don't want to actually see everyone that applied from you. And I remember when I was a, when I was a young recruiter, you know, that was kind of my mode. I didn't have a lot of great recruiter mentors in the beginning. And so I was looking for signals from my hiring managers who at the time, in my early 20s, I treated like my customer and the customer was always right. So I was just trying to please the hiring manager. Right. So the hiring manager wanted to see everyone that applied. Here's everyone that applied. If you want to see all the resume, here's all the. And what I started to realize is, wow, those managers are not getting the same kind of talent as these other managers. What are these other managers doing differently? And they really, truly had a quality over quantity thing. And I even had some of them saying, God, don't send me all 20 applicants or 50 or, I don't want to log into the ATS and see everyone. Like, that is the last thing I want to do. I'm looking for you to present three, four or five qualified, interested, available candidates I can afford. That's what I want to see from you. And it really shaped my thinking. And as I, as I evolved and got more senior, I realized that it went beyond just kind of quantity of resumes, but even quality. Many of the best hiring managers, they don't just say, I want a players and rock stars and high potential, high performers. They define that. They spend time really working with you to define it. And a strong hiring manager, a smart hiring manager won't let her and her team get away with saying, you know, we just want someone smart who gets things done. They will actually dig in and define something that goes beyond the job description. They will actually define quality in a very specific way and not let coded words. Coded words that we know now in 2021 are often loaded with bias, like high Potential or something might mean you look like me from a diversity standpoint, you know, were homogenous. You remind me of myself when I was your age. You know, that kind of thing. Right. They're defining quality a little differently. I even did a project once I was at Amazon in the early days, and we used to talk about hiring really smart people. And by the way, I was usually the dumbest person in every room, every meeting I was in, which was a wonderful experience for me. But one of the things that I did is I actually realized we're throwing around this term smart, and we have a defined smart. And so I worked with some of these really engaged, savvy hiring leaders. These ones that I knew were hiring really amazing talent. You could tell by their contributions, not by their pedigree, but by their contributions, they were amazing talent. And I thought, I wonder how they're thinking about smart. And so we actually unpacked smart. We actually defined smart. And it took months of back and forth to really break it down so that we were really aligned on the signals and the evidence during the interview. Things that weren't necessarily on a resume or cv, but things you can learn in an interview. And so the best hiring managers, to me, have this quality focus, and they're not interested in quantity, but when they do have that quality focus, they actually define it. You know, they're being very specific around what it means.

So. So it's, you know, easy for us to say, you know, it is quality, not quantity. And therefore they're going to just focus on the best. But for recruiters and talent acquisition folks who've been handing over shortlists time and time again, and there's just. There isn't trust, right? They're kind of going, just, just send them all to me, you know, or they're sending you back after giving you eight. Go, go again, go again. You know, when you hear those kind of stories, they don't trust me. They want all the resumes, or, hey, they said, I sent them eight. They said, no. You know, when you're trying to diagnose those kind of issues, what do you often see is the problem that's happening? What's blocking us having a relationship where we give quality? They trust and they act upon it.

Yeah, I think it's a few things, I mean, I think where, you know, if it's the first time you're working with a hiring manager, it's kind of hard to kind of come in already credible unless you have a track record with people that that hiring manager respects. Right. But, but if it's, if it's someone that is kind of pushing back, I still want to see everyone. I would ask you to pause and ask yourself, does this hiring manager really want to spend their time reviewing 20, 50, 75 applicants? And the answer is probably no. But one of the reasons that a lot of hiring managers will request quantity, quantity, quantity. One is they don't really know what they're looking for, right? So they just want to see stuff. Two is they're not in pain, so they have this open role and they're just kind of curious and I'm going to take my time and I just want to see. And third is we enable it, like we don't shut that shit down. We just kind of, you know, we just kind of let them ask us and we just give them more and more. And there needs to be a point where you insert yourself in and you ask, why is this going on? What's the root issue? Is this a, we didn't define what we're really looking for? Is this more of a, you know, I haven't done a good job of setting expectations on what's available in the market and they're trying to learn the market, like how can I, how can I not be an enabler of this, but actually drive them more to this slate of candidates? And you're going to choose from these 3, 4, 5 candidates that we work on. And one of the techniques that a recruiter on my team did, which was fantastic because she would have calibration resume or profile calibration meetings where she would sit down laptop to laptop, today we do it over zoom and during the kickoff meeting as a way to kind of accelerate a metric that doesn't exist, but it's a metric I'm kind of pushing is this metric of time to alignment. How long does it take for you, the recruiter to get aligned with the hiring manager on what good looks like? And so she would sit laptop to laptop and they would review candidate profiles on LinkedIn or you know, if they were tech profiles on some of the tech code sharing sites and other things. And then, you know, real resumes, resumes that are, that are real, that are people applying, but also maybe resumes that are, you know, second place runner ups from other positions she'd worked on. But there was real time calibration going on and that was a really powerful way for her to go from, you know, job description language, which can be very broad or even worse. Hiring managers just want to hire someone smart who can hit the ground Running, which is like the most bullshit requirement I've ever heard. But, but I get it. I get, I try and get, I get what they're trying to get at, but it's not a real requirement. Right? So, so doing that calibration is a really effective way to get people lined up. And that's something that we recommend. Our talent advisor training is to try and insert yourself in that first meeting and get aligned really, really quickly. And that tends to shut down much more of the, the kind of, you know, let me see more, more, more kind of thing.

Good. Coming here from Srivasai saying hire managers will open up more to us when they see results from us which stand out from the rest of the crowd. We then kind of start getting into those strategy conversations and get them to buy our part of the story. Again, doing your work first to prove it. So you mentioned speed to alignment. Talk to me about speed and maybe point three.

Yeah. So, you know, the third thing, I have this funny saying. I think it's funny. You know, speed is the love language of hiring managers. And I remember when I was, when I was young, I had a family member who, you know, studied psychology and, you know, would talk about this notion of the love language of different people. And it was mostly in the context of, I think, you know, marital counseling, work or whatever, like, what's your, what's your love language? And so, you know, as someone that had a Croatian grandmother who liked to cook for me, you know, food was definitely, you know, the love language between us. And that was our bond. And that's how she communicated love was through her cooking. For example. In a recruiting context, though, I would say, you know, speed, speed is the love language of hiring managers. And, you know, one of the things I learned from hiring managers is I would often come in with my traditional HR hat on. I'm John from, you know, the talent team and I'm here to help you. And almost everything I said next sounded to the hiring manager like I was going to slow them down. I'm going to help you by giving you new interview guides you have to complete. I'm going to help you by teaching you how to do self service in the ATS and fill out these 82, you know, fields and to open a new rec. I'm going to help you by allowing you to do more of your own sourcing. And most of what is communicated from HR unfortunately slows hiring managers down. And so one of the things I quickly realized, if I could pause this, is based on a lot of feedback, lots of people critiquing my work as a recruiter, as a recruiting leader, a lot of people give me feedback like, I need you to help us go faster. I don't want to hear about a time to fill target in recruiting. I don't want to hear what our competitors are doing. I'm telling you, I want you to cut 20 days off time to fill, and I want to hear some ideas for how we do that. And when you get pushed to cut 20 days, not two days, but 20 days off, a 50 day time to fill or something that is significant, you really have to think differently. And so what I realized more and more is that the hiring managers that were most savvy, they were not sacrificing quality, but they were looking, they were inspecting the process. They're like, why do we interview like this? Why don't we do it in a batch format? Why do we do everything as a one off? Why don't we make decisions the same day? I would love to say that I came up with a lot of the ideas that I implemented in my career from just kind of navel gazing and looking up to the stars and thinking we should do it differently. But a lot of it was because I was under incredible pressure to deliver faster to scale. And a lot of the ideas that we came up with, I realized if they were in service to speed, they were in service to the hiring manager. I've never met a hiring manager. That's not true. I rarely meet hiring managers that don't want to go faster. Right. I mean, almost everyone wants to go faster. So the more we can kind of help with speed, the more we're winning, the more that we are framing our work around, you know, our metrics or, you know, source of hire, for example. Hiring managers don't care about source of hire. If it's, if you're delivering speed, quality and diversity, they don't care. But, but too much of our communication is around kind of our internal stuff. And we're not connecting the dots. We're not showing like, if you do this, you will go faster. Instead we're saying this is a new thing you have to do. We're rolling it out globally. We want one consistent process, you know, consistency and process. That's the language of hr and it's not the right language for the best hiring managers.

If you were to think of one thing or one part or time in the process, John, that's probably going to unlock the most, the most value in trying to increase speed. You know, where in the process do you think the most value can be unlocked or what is the thing that you most commonly see that a recruiter or hiring manager can do to try and unlock that speed? Is there a one thing or a top thing?

Yeah, I mean let me just say first you should look at time and stage. So if you are, you know, applicant tracking system or your manual tracking is simply like what's the date the reg opened? And then when did we kind of get an accepted offer? That's not enough. You really need to break it down in time and stage. So I did a project with Adidas for example, years ago and I was in Germany and their ATS allowed them to break out time to fill in stage and you could actually see how long it took from the time a rec was opened to the time when the first candidate was interviewed or screened to how long screening to interviews, how long interviews, you know, that kind of thing. Right. And you could actually compare like here's how long it's taking for you on average hiring manager who fills 10 recs in a year, here's the company average and you are well above the company average. Like it was kind of a bar chart time and stage. And I really like the visual around that. So first step is, I'll give you an example. But the first step is you should diagnose your own kind of funnel and see how long things are taking in a stage because you might be surprised. But the area where I see that the biggest opportunities, they're both related to interviewing. One is just scheduling can be a nightmare to get the key people. So too many people are involved, they're in too many time zones, they're too busy, you don't have access to the calendars. We waste so much time scheduling, unscheduling, rescheduling, that's just kind of a no brainer kind of low hanging fruit pre book interview days with hiring managers. And then similarly making same day decisions is what companies that are beating you for beating you out for talent are doing. They're, they're having same day wrap up debrief meetings and they're making decisions, they're comparing candidates to the requirements, not waiting to get seven candidates interviewed and then have one mega meeting and compare all seven three weeks after the, you know, the first candidate was interviewed, they're making same day decisions. And I think there's really a lot of excuses and kind of victimy kind of language that recruiters will use around why that's hard to do. And the reality is, you know, your competitors, which probably include Companies we work with are doing it, even what we consider older companies are doing it and moving in that direction. And so that to me is just an unbelievably low hanging fruit opportunity is to make same day decisions.

We're three down John. Two to go. Gimme number four.

Yeah, so number four is great candidates demand great hiring managers. And one of the things that I saw with my own eyes is that the hiring managers who get the best talent, they own it. They don't see recruiting as something outside of their day job. You know, they, they, they are absolutely involved in, in courting candidates early in the process and staying close to the candidate throughout the process. And when I first started kind of, you know, trying to elevate myself from more of a transactional recruiter, customer service recruiter to that of more of an advisor and eventually got promoted to lead manager, director, head of, you know, in my career I realized that I needed to reframe some of my requests of hiring managers. I think my initial framing was I want to be your talent advisor, I want to be a strategic partner to you and therefore I need you to do these kinds of things so I can partner with you effectively. And then we're going to get speed, quality, diversity, these kinds of outcomes. And that worked pretty well. I'd say that's kind of a B, kind of on an ABCDF kind of scale. That's pretty, pretty good. What I realized worked even better, especially during the last decade where there was so much competition for talent, unemployment was at record lows for most of the time, was that I needed to reframe it, that great candidates need you to be a great hiring manager. Don't be a great hiring manager just because I want you to be. Because we're setting some standard for what great looks like for hiring managers. Do it because if you don't, you are not going to get great talent. And so the past couple years worked with my team to develop something called the hiring manager maturity model. And I was thinking about the kinds of hiring managers that are getting the best talent actually very much kind of champion this notion of, you know, I own it, it's part of my day job. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to not only I'm not going to even wait for recruiting, I'm not going to wait for your process, I'm not going to wait for your 11 steps to do X. I'm going to own this because I know that I need to own this if I'm going to get the kind of Talent I want to get. And so I've seen lots of examples. I'll tell you a quick funny story of someone who did not own it. When I joined Amazon, I was 28, heading up tech recruiting. It was kind of a new kind of role for me. And the company was just selling books, just in the United States, much smaller company. But it was interesting. One of the most respected engineering leaders happened to be a horrific partner to recruiting. And not horrific because he was mean or unreasonable. In fact, he was too reasonable. He was slow and he didn't own it. And I remember when I was doing my rounds, meeting new leaders, all the directors in the business, kind of new in my job. Second, third day on the job, I met with this guy and, and I was asking him a little bit about his business and what's going on. He said, yeah, John, actually I do have a specific request for you. I made an offer to an engineer about two weeks ago. And you know what, I never heard back. And I'm really curious, you know, if he's going to accept or not. And I remember laughing, going, oh, I can tell you right now, I don't even have to check, like, he did not accept. Like, there's no scenario where someone just sits on an offer for two. But it really highlighted for me, like just the complete diversity, kind of a bell curve of. I had these like amazing hiring managers that would never say something like that. That is such a passive, I wonder what's going on? No, recruiters don't tell me anything. We made an offer and I never heard back, did he accept? I mean, that is so passive. You know what I mean? And then I had managers that were so aggressive, you know, they were engaging headhunters directly. They were building their own university recruiting programs on the side. They were, you know, they were, they were driving their interviewing, their interviewing training. They're delivering their own training. They were owning it. But, But a lot of what I've seen when I look at the hiring managers get the best talent. We do a lot of focus group with candidates and I ask candidates sometimes, why did you come to this company and not here? You had offers at Google and Facebook and Netflix and Amazon and wherever. Why did you come to this company? And they said, you know, it wasn't because the money was the best. It wasn't. It wasn't even because the job was that different. It really wasn't. I'm a data scientist or whatever. It's all really interesting. It was the hiring manager. The hiring manager was the difference maker. The Hiring manager invested in me, not just selling me, but really listening to me. And I felt confident that this person I could learn from, this person I wanted to work for. And so that's something that I realized is this reframing from help me be a better hiring manager or you need to be a better hiring manager to help me so I can help you is not the right framing? The right framing, I think, or a better framing is great. Candidates are going to demand this. So if you want this kind of talent and you're operating here, you got to step up.

Yeah, it's funny, myself and yourself were on a call yesterday and we were just looking at some glassdoor reviews from different companies. And, you know, so much of it is about the hiring manager. And I don't know that hiring managers or most hiring managers understand that the spotlight really is on them. And they kind of blame recruiters for a recruiting process. But like the candidates saying, you're the person I'm going to go work for, like, this is my first introduction to you and how you work and how you prioritize, you know, and nobody probably knows in the first interview if you're going to be the future hire, but you got to treat them, I guess, like they're your future best team member and really make sure you're putting the effort in returning their calls. You know, being engaged, you know, glassdoors littered with examples of hiring managers are completely, completely disengaged. Right. And, you know, maybe you're not going to hire that person, but they know so many people in their sector. They're part of your community. They're not part of the recruiting community. They'll forget about the recruiters. Chances are you're going to. If you're a salesperson or a sales lead or a sales head or you're a technical head, you're going to probably come across them or you're going to be in the same communities and this is your reputation on the line. You know, you're so right that, you know, there is that high expectation. And, you know, I just don't think. I don't think that enough people realize that. I'm not putting blame on the hiring managers. I think it's the job of the recruiters to show them that, to bring them into this world if they're not already there because they're busy, they're doing stuff, they're leading teams. I'm going to quickly jump back to some of you mentioned. John, you talked about a hiring manager maturity model. Can we access that? Folks listening can they access that? Can they find out more about that? If they want to dig into that, yeah, for sure.

And I think we even have a graphic prepared. I don't know if Neil's able to throw that up. Yeah. So the URL recruiting toolbox.com Hmmm. One of the things that I mentioned is put together kind of a maturity model, you know, something that says, how do you move from this kind of passive aggressive, you know, I wonder if that candidate accepted my offer and if I'm not hitting my hiring goals, it's because my recruiter sucks. If you can move from that end of the spectrum to this kind of talent champion who's really driving and leading and owning. This is a really interesting tool designed for recruiters and recruiting leaders who really care about up leveling the capabilities of their hiring manager. And so it's got some very tactical, practical how to kind of recommendations to help you make your hiring managers better hiring managers. And I actually think that's a big part of recruiting success from this past decade is not just, you know, filling roles with great talent, but also how do we, how do we leave a legacy behind after we've worked in a, in a role or worked with a client where we've actually made our hiring managers better at their jobs. And so this is really designed to help you have an honest conversation. Where are our hiring managers today and how do we move them up and to the right to get them kind of more effective at their jobs?

So I know we got a wrapped audience listening, the live audience who are going to rush towards the inauguration ceremony which kicks off in just under 30 minutes. John. But that brings us to probably five of five from all these smartest hiring managers you've dealt with over the years. What's the last piece of advice you want to share with us from those smartest hiring managers?

Yeah, you know what's interesting is the best hiring managers actually want us to be a talent advisor. They want a strategic partner. They pull us in. And I said a little bit earlier, I think it's a mistake if it feels like you're having to constantly push on a hiring manager. Like, let me hold still while I talent advise you. It's kind of a. I have a little sticker that says that which is kind of the orientation like, oh, the manager's all over the. Hold still, I want to tell. No, come here. I want it here. Come here. Come talk to me now. Hold still. I want to tell. You know, that's probably, you're probably not in the right kind of, you know, the relationship is probably not great if you're literally having to chase the very best hiring managers. I was diagnosing and kind of trying to figure out, looking back, like when I got invited in or when recruiters on my team got invited into quarterly business review meetings, when managers started saying, department head, start saying, I really want to make sure my recruiter or my recruiting managers in this meeting we're going to talk about strategic planning. When I started to look at, like, what, what is different about those hiring managers, what kind of results are they getting versus the ones that not only don't invite us into those meetings, but those meetings don't even talk about talent. And I realized the ones that are getting the best talent, they're actually pulling us in as advisors. They're asking us tough questions. These are the managers that expect more from us. And I would love to say I've had, you know, 100amazing recruiting manager bosses in my career and I haven't. Not to discount some of the great stuff I've learned from my managers over the years, but the people that have pushed me, the people that have been kind of the ones that have stretched me into new areas, that have made me better at my craft, have really been unrealistic, unreasonable hiring managers. But they do it with love. It's because they want to get great talent. Not because they're micromanagers, not because they're acids. It's because they expect more. I have this little sticker I'll share with you. It's kind of funny. I don't know if you can see.

That there, but call it out for our podcast listeners. John, I love this.

It says, I eat unrealistic hiring manager requirements for breakfast. And one of my favorite recruiters who happens to work at Amazon now, she worked at Microsoft and Google, Amy Miller, she got one of the T shirts with this on it and posted it a few days ago, which made me very happy. But that's something that I kind of joke about is, you know, that kind of bring it. Like, I actually want unrealistic hiring managers. Not unrealistic, like hard to work with, but unreasonable because they want the very best talent and we don't pay the best. Unreasonable because they want to cut 20 days out of a 50 day process when the average in the company is already 60 days and they want to actually, you know, it's that kind of stuff, those kinds of managers to put these constraints on you that really drive innovation, that really force you to come up with things that are, you know, I Hate to use this term out of the box and really different than how you've done it before. And so I think the best hiring managers, they're pushing on us. They are actually making us talent advisors. They are demanding that. And so when we have focus groups and we talk to, you know, at least thousand hiring managers a year through focus groups and training work, that's one of the things that's really been interesting. I would say five, six years ago, there wasn't nearly as much pull. It's like, I want a recruiter who will manage the process, send me good candidates, and then get out of my way. Now it's like, I want insights like, should we open our sales office in the United States and Chicago or Atlanta and why. I want someone that's coming in and telling me, like, what are the top three sources for candidates from underrepresented groups? I'm not seeing nearly enough Hispanic or African American candidates. What is it that we should be doing differently and how can I do that? I want feedback on my team's performance as an interviewing team. Are we doing a good job? How do we know? Like, they're asking these questions. They're expecting a lot more out of us. And that, to me, is thrilling. One of the best things you can do for your career is work with unrealistic, unreasonable hiring managers. Not again, the asses. Although the asses will give you some great stories to tell, because that's important too. But it's the ones. It's the situations where you can kind of run to the fire. You know, it's those people that kind of see there's a hiring manager in pain. There's a lot of. There's a lot of stuff going on. They're expecting all this. And if you run towards those people, you will leapfrog your peers in your career because you will get this density of experience that you just won't get from kind of reasonable people filling wrecks over and over and over again. So. So that's. That's number five out of five.

I think if there's any upside from. For recruiters in all the technology, innovation, new processes that have come in over the last few years is to give us the time to be this type of talent advisor. And, you know, has only hit me over the last few years because I wasn't good enough on these areas back in my day when I was a recruiter. I'll be honest now, looking back, but to me, like, there's two big buckets you gotta be great at. One is. And We've got some people on the chat already mentioned this market intelligence, or what you might call the candidate kind of marketplace, understanding the candidates that are out there deeply, you know, the competitors who are looking for that. So that intelligence on the kind of the roles you're hiring for, the people who represent the skills you're looking for, the competitors who are out there hiring, you got to bring that to the table. But the other part is process around hiring. You are a hiring expert. So again, it's your job to figure out what's the best way to get a really good outcome. How do I, you know, from this, all my knowledge on talent and all the perhaps people we can attract to a shortlist or source, how do I convert it into a really good outcome, an excellent hire that's going to be successful in that team. Your job is to also know that, make recommendations on assessment methodologies, on the structure. You know, to kind of go to a hiring manager goes, there's four interviews I want to do is like, no, you're going to do two, they're going to look like this, or I'm a one interview person. No, we're going to have three. And let me tell you why it's going to be three parts of our process. I think, you know, I don't think you can survive as a recruiter unless you're that kind of a talented advisor. Would you agree?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, it's been amazing because to your point, we have things available now in 2021, even the last five years that you and I didn't have available to us, you know, 10 years ago for sure, or longer. And so I think, you know, shame on us if we're not leveraging some of the great insights. And I'll tell you, you know, the recruiter before, you may have had, you know, more strategic conversations than you had with this hiring manager. And it may be, you know, at your same company or at the company they worked out before. And so one of the things I'm also seeing is smaller companies, kind of tier 2 companies that don't get in the news a lot are hiring a lot more sophisticated hiring managers that are coming to these smaller firms out of these big tech companies or out of these, you know, big retailers or, you know, big whatever industry leaders. And they're coming to these smaller companies and they're bringing those high expectations with them. They're like, well, my last company, the recruiter, did a market analysis and you know, we didn't just look at Compensations, you know, comp reports. We actually did our own market analysis. When should I expect to get that from you? And you're like, what? I don't, you know, I've never done that before. But so what's happening, which is beautiful to me, is that we're moving these people around, around. A lot of them have these really high expectations and even in smaller companies you're seeing expectations around. I want a recommendation on my interview process. I want, they're actually pulling for that kind of stuff because they've had it in the past and I love that about our industry. This kind of people moving around bigger, smaller companies, big scale, small scale. We're just kind of, we're in this kind of amazing, we're all kind of racing up this learning curve together and it's just, it's, it's a fantastic time to be in recruiting.

My opinion, I spoke to a great TA leader in one of those kind of smaller to medium sizes but high growth companies last week and she was saying how the business came through last year and said, hey, we're thinking of doing this bit of this project and hiring these people in this location, which was a bad idea. And they sent a 20 page report with analysis going, don't do it. And they came back to her last week and said, hey, we're thinking about doing that project again. She said, I sent them back an 80 page report this time. You got the message, it lasted a year. You're back asking the same question. Trust me, the data hasn't changed. Here's even more. I love that. That's the type of thing we do these days. We got a great comment here from Ian Martin saying gotta love those unicorn hunting hiring managers. I think a new sticker, John, maybe it's, it's unicorn hunting hiring machine like that maybe might be on the list for you, but yeah, I second that. I'm gonna recap, John, because I'm conscious that I'm sure you want to go, go watch the inauguration as well and get to this big momentous time in history today. But, but five points, just to recap, can you bring us back through just quickly what those five points are and we can recap on them?

Yeah, sure. So the first one is strategy starts before the kickoff. It's one of those things that is not, you know, real strategy doesn't happen in 30 minutes when during the urgency of I got to get this wreck filled. The second one is that, you know, the best hiring managers really do focus on quality over quantity and they don't want to just see more and more resumes. They actually want to spend less time on fewer candidates or more time on fewer candidates. The third one is that speed is the love language of hiring managers. If you want to, you know, influence a hiring manager, if you want to be a hero to hiring managers, talk about how you can speed things up, not be the person that's always slowing things down. And then the, the, you know, great candidates demand hiring managers is, is part of the. The reframing that I think we can do to kind of help hiring managers. See if you want to get that kind of talent, you need to step up differently. They're interviewing us as much as we're interviewing them. And a big part of their decision making will be whether or not they consider you a great hiring manager and how close you've been to this process. And then the last one is there's a tremendous amount of poll. Hiring managers actually want us to be more of a strategic partner to play that talent advisor role. Their expectations of us are going up just as our expectations of them are going up, which I think makes for just phenomenal opportunities for learning and growth and impact and all the things that we care about. So those are the top five.

You dropped so much advice and tips in the last 45 minutes. It probably seems rude of me to ask if you have any one last piece of advice to leave us with to add to our shortlist, like we ask every guest and we asked you the last time you were on.

Yeah. I think the one thing I would mention this is in the hiring manager maturity model as well is we do need to expect more from our hiring managers and we need to articulate that and whatever you can do in your company to influence adding in something about is this manager an effective hiring manager to performance reviews? Anything you can do to switch up all the surveys that we send out as corporate TA teams. You know, how's my driving hiring manager? Am I making you happy? Are you? We need to switch that up. And we need to be sending surveys to recruiters asking how hiring managers are doing when a rec is closed. We need to find opportunities to kind of raise the expectation of hiring managers and hold them accountable through performance reviews, through survey feedback. We really need to elevate the expectations. And I think that's going to have a huge impact, not just on us, not just to make my job more fun, because I love working with hiring managers. It's favorite part of my job. Probably even more than working with candidates. We need to not just do that but we also need to make sure that we are creating these better hiring managers and giving them feedback and holding them accountable. And I think that's missing for a lot of TA teams right now. So that'd be my parting advice.

It's great. It's not just pointing at the negatives, it's highlighting the brilliant ones. To your point, gives an opportunity to shine a light and say, this hiring manager, she's awesome. And here's why everyone should be more like that. John, thank you so much for joining us. It's a big day, big advice. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. We'll hopefully have you back later in the year, but I'll leave you to go witness a momentous time in history. Inauguration of a new President of the United States in 15 minutes for those of you listening live. John, thanks for joining us. We'll have you back again.

Thanks Johnny. Thanks everyone.

And for the rest of you joining us live, thank you for listening. Thanks for your questions and comments. We're going to be back again next week. We've got a great show planned for you next week. You can find out more by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist. But joining us next week we're gonna have Bob Rosen. Bob Rosen is Chairman and CEO of Healthy Companies International. He's a world renowned speaker and expert on leadership. And Bob's going to be having a conversation with me about conscious and healthy leadership tactics for 2021. So appropriate with a new leader in the United states in hopefully 14 minutes time when President Elect Biden is inaugurated. If you're listening to the podcast, hopefully he's already been inaugurated and put in as the new President, the 46th President United States and hopefully will promise us great leadership over the next four years. If leadership is important to you, which it should be in 2021, join us next week at the same time. That's 4pm UK Irish time. That's of course 11am on the east coast United States, 8am on the west coast and go Google where it is in your clock or check out our recordings, our podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Now go watch the inauguration if you're watching live or re watch it if you haven't. Hopefully we have a new president for those of you re watching or releasing the podcast in the United States and a better four years to come. Thanks for joining me.

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