Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / The Mismatch Between Recruiters and Hiring Managers
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this stat that keeps bouncing around my brain: according to a study by the Corporate Executive Board, nearly sixty percent of hiring managers say recruiters don't understand the role they're hiring for. And recruiters say the exact same thing about hiring managers. Luna: That is a recipe for disaster. Two people who need to be on the same page, each convinced the other is the problem. Lucas: Right. And it's not just anecdotal. I was looking at data from a mid-size B2B software company — let's call them TechFlow — and their time to hire had crept up to a hundred and twenty days. That's four months to fill a single role. Luna: In this market? That's brutal. Their competitors are probably filling similar roles in half that time. Lucas: Exactly what they were worried about. So we did a deep dive into their process. What we found was that the recruiter and the hiring manager had never, in the history of their working relationship, sat down and defined what 'qualified' actually meant for the roles they were hiring for. Luna: Wait — they'd never had that conversation? Not even once? Lucas: Not once. The hiring manager would send over a job description that was basically a wish list — ten years of experience in a technology that had only existed for five, plus a laundry list of soft skills. The recruiter would go out and find candidates who matched maybe sixty percent of those requirements, and the hiring manager would reject them for not having the full package. Luna: So the recruiter is set up to fail from the start. They're being asked to find a unicorn. Lucas: Exactly. And when the role stays open for months, the recruiter gets blamed for being ineffective. But the root cause is a misalignment that happens before the first candidate is even sourced. There's a really simple framework that I've seen fix this, and it starts with three questions. Luna: Okay, I want to hear those. But first — and I feel like this is the right moment to say it — if you're listening and you've ever found yourself nodding along to this kind of conversation, if these episodes have helped you think differently about how you hire or manage your team, we just want you to know that we deliberately keep this show ad-free. Lucas: Yeah, it's a choice we made from day one. No sponsors, no mid-roll interruptions, just the conversation. And the only reason we can do that is because some listeners choose to support us directly. Luna: So if that resonates with you, there's a link — it's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure at all, but it does help us keep doing what we're doing. And now, Lucas, tell me about those three questions. Lucas: Alright. Question one: What is the single most important thing this person needs to be able to do in the first ninety days? Not everything — the one thing. Luna: That forces the hiring manager to prioritise. They can't just list everything. Lucas: Right. Question two: Of the requirements in the job description, which ones are negotiable and which are non-negotiable? And I mean truly non-negotiable — not 'we'd really like it.' Luna: This is where the recruiter needs to push back. If the hiring manager says 'five years of Python' but the team is using a framework that's only been around for three, that's a conversation. Lucas: Exactly. And question three: What does a strong candidate look like in terms of behaviour, not just resume bullets? Give me an example of something a great hire would have done in a previous role. Luna: That's the one that changes everything. Because when you say 'they led a team,' that could mean two people or two hundred. But if you say 'they reorganized a team of twelve after a merger and kept retention above ninety percent,' now the recruiter knows exactly what to look for. Lucas: TechFlow implemented this exact framework. It took them about two hours — one meeting between the recruiter and the hiring manager to answer those three questions for their highest-priority role. The result was a thirty percent reduction in time to hire within two months. Luna: And I bet quality went up too. Because if you're not wasting time on candidates who never had a chance, you can spend more energy on the ones who do. Lucas: That's exactly what happened. Their offer acceptance rate actually improved, because candidates weren't getting strung along through four rounds of interviews only to be rejected for something that should have been clear on day one. Luna: So the recruiter becomes a true partner rather than just a resume filter. The hiring manager gets better candidates faster. It seems almost too simple. Lucas: It is simple. But it's not easy, because it requires both sides to be vulnerable. The hiring manager has to admit they don't actually know exactly what they want, and the recruiter has to be willing to challenge a senior leader. Luna: Has there been any research on how common this misalignment really is? Because it feels like one of those problems everyone knows about but nobody measures. Lucas: There's a study from the Society for Human Resource Management — SHRM — that found that misaligned expectations between recruiters and hiring managers contribute to a forty percent higher likelihood of a bad hire. And the average cost of a bad hire? For a mid-level professional, it's about thirty to fifty percent of their annual salary. Luna: So if you're hiring someone at eighty thousand, a bad hire could cost you forty thousand dollars or more. That's a huge incentive to get this right. Lucas: And yet, most companies don't have a structured process for this alignment. They rely on the recruiter to 'figure it out' or the hiring manager to 'write a better req.' But the system itself is broken. Luna: So what's the one thing a listener could do tomorrow to start fixing this? Not a full overhaul, just a first step. Lucas: Pick one open role. Schedule a thirty-minute meeting with the recruiter. Bring a printed copy of the job description. Cross out anything that isn't truly essential. Then write down the answer to the three questions we talked about. That's it. If you do that for one role, you'll see the difference. Luna: I like that. It's actionable, it's low-cost, and it forces the conversation that should have been happening all along. Lucas: And once you see how much smoother the process gets, you'll want to do it for every role. That's the pattern we've seen at companies that really get this right. Luna: Alright, so for next episode, I want to talk about something that came up in our research: the rise of the 'recruiter scorecard' — where companies actually measure recruiter performance by something other than time to fill. Lucas: Oh that's a good one. Because if you only measure speed, you get fast bad hires. If you measure quality of hire and retention, you get a completely different behaviour. Luna: Exactly. So that's next time. For now, if you want to try the three-question framework, the template is in the show notes. And if you found this useful, you know where to find us. Lucas: Yeah, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Thanks for listening.