Why hiring managers should own their recruiting pipeline strategy

As a hiring manager, I own the success of my team. That means I need to own their recruiting process and strategy too. Without the right process or technology that’s impossible to do, because I have no visibility into the recruiting pipeline.

As someone who has hired, and managed, salespeople for 10 years, I know a lot about pipelines. And I’m convinced:

If hiring managers don’t have full visibility into their recruiting pipeline, they’ll fail to hire the right people fast enough.

And that’s on them. Not their recruiter.

Bad visibility is the real pipeline problem

Here’s how the traditional recruiting process works, from the hiring manager’s point of view:

Email a job description to a HR manager or recruiter. Wait. Follow up. Get an email telling you 100 people applied. See 5 resumes, attached. Email feedback. Wait. Follow up. Repeat. (Often for weeks.)

This is not a pipe. It’s a game of boomerang. And hiring managers play it wearing blindfolds.

This boomerang process is slow and it makes me miss out on high quality candidates. But that’s not my HR manager or recruiter’s fault – I’ve worked with excellent HR managers and recruiters. It’s just a bad process that leaves hiring managers in the dark.

Full visibility is the solution

The traditional hiring process relies on email. Any process that relies on email is a blackhole. To draw real light on their recruiting pipeline strategy, hiring managers need to graduate from emails and get:

• Full visibility from start to finish. This means hiring managers need to be able to see every application, every sourced candidate and every phone screen outcome.

• An easy way to move candidates between different stages of the recruiting pipeline, with a single click, not a back-and-forth email exchange.

• A mobile-friendly option to review and screen candidates on the go. Not PDF attachments in emails with text that’s so tiny you can’t read it on your phone.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) gives hiring managers all of this. It gives them visibility, flexibility and mobile-friendly control. With an ATS, I have the opportunity to read through every candidate’s resume. As a hiring manager in Sales, this is gold. Because good sales candidates come from a variety of backgrounds.

With the Workable ATS, I screen applicants on the train on my way to work. I can see if my recruiting pipelines need a recruiting agency top-up to help me hit my hiring targets. And I can build a strong sales team, on time and on point.

If you’d like to join me, I’m hiring. And I can assure you, I’ll see your application: