The Missing Link: How Recruiters Actually Become Trusted Business Partners

We spoke about this in the newsletter recently, but given the current climate, recruiters are being forced to do, and achieve, more with less. Whether it’s increasing the speed or volume of hires, bolstering quality, or bringing diversity, recruiters must optimize their approach to talent acquisition in a way that still delivers success.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of around forty recruiters at an event in Manchester. During this, we surveyed the room on a specific topic: How much time would you save per requisition if you had a better business partnership with your hiring managers?

The results were stark – 95% said they would save more than a week on each requisition. One week per requisition! That’s an insane benefit.

I’m sure every recruiter gets this. But the struggle was not about understanding that building this relationship was the right thing to do – it was the practicalities of how.

In particular, the question that kept coming up was: where do you start? How do you present as a trusted talent advisor when the hiring manager won’t even take your meetings? What steps do you take to cultivate this partnership?

The Current State

SocialTalent recently released our new Talent Advisor 2.0 program, but it seems many recruiters are still struggling with Talent Advisor 1.0! And it’s completely understandable. When traditions are in place and the status quo has seen you become subservient to hiring managers and their demands, it can be immensely difficult to discover what that critical unlock is to becoming more consultative.

When I look at this, it seems to me that a great recruiter should have expertise in two core areas:

• The candidate market
• The hiring process

While a hiring manager may know her team and the requirements of the role she is looking to fill, it is your job to educate them on the art of hiring. And the best way to start a partnership that is mutually beneficial to both parties is to bring data.

It’s all about data when you want to get a foot in the door.

How to Bring Data to the Table

It used to be an incredibly laborious and expensive  task to find relevant data on the hiring market and the best ways to approach a particular req in the past. But with the advent of Gen AI and ChatGPT, these insights are at your fingertips and are an incredibly persuasive means of getting your hiring managers to take the partnership seriously.

Let’s demo a role now. Imagine we’re in the process of needing a new copywriter, what are the kinds of questions you would ask ChatGPT to help you scope out this requisition:

• What’s currently happening in the world of copywriting?
• Who is hiring copywriters in Dublin?
• What are the current salary bands?
• How do we shape up against the other companies hiring copywriters? Who are these companies?
• Are copywriting skills in more or less demand now?
• What are the predicted trends within this field?
• Tell me about the availability of copywriting skills over the next 4 years.
• Use sources that are credible like EY, Accenture, BCG, Deloitte, etc. Quote the sources and produce this into a one-page report.

These are just some examples and it’ll need tailoring, fact-checking, added nuance, interpretation, and information from the recruiter to pull this together. But it’s fairly instantaneous and compelling. And, there’d be nothing stopping you from creating your own custom GPT to help smooth this process even more in the future!

This is the kind of data that can enable you to make really good hires. And being able to present this to a hiring manager in an easily consumable manner at the start of an alignment meeting can help set the expectation and demonstrates that what you bring to this partnership can hugely impact the quality and speed of hire.

Driving this Home

I’d love to say that this is a foolproof hack for how you solidify your position as a talent advisor over an order-taking recruiter, but unfortunately it’s not. It is, however, the first and most crucial step.

I’ve had so many recruiters say they can’t even get on a call with their hiring managers to present this data, or that when they do get a chance, they’re dismissed. In these situations, I advocate for perseverance. If they’re not accepting your calls, email them the data. If you’re being shut down, continue to work in this vein with other amenable hiring managers and show how much better your metrics of success are on those fronts. It’s not an emotional tactic, it’s just the facts.

While it can sometimes feel like a game of attrition, we all fundamentally know that better relationships with hiring managers, coupled with insightful market data, massively augments your chances of making quick, key hires with the right talent. Getting the partnership right at the start of proceedings is like fixing a problem upstream – it leads to so many more desirable outcomes. But it starts with data. Data is what will give you the best opportunity to cultivate an aligned process.

This article originally appeared in Johnny Campbell’s Talent Leadership Insights LinkedIn newsletter. Click here to subscribe!