The Hiring Manager + Recruiting Relationship

Vanessa Tapia Douglas is a former Recruiting Manager at Abnormal Security, who prides herself on building world-class teams. Previous to Abnormal, Vanessa worked at Twitter, Google, and IBM where she was involved in various recruiting initiatives. While passionate about many different things, Vanessa loves recruiting in particular because she loves working with people.

Vanessa Tapia Douglas: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this lesson on the hiring manager and recruiter relationship as a part of the Startup Recruiting Process class. My name is Vanessa and I'm a recruiting manager here at abnormal security. And will be your teacher for this lesson today.

As we start, I just wanna give a quick overview on what we're doing and gonna focus on today. I know you've learned a lot about the recruiting process. The point of today is wrapping it all up to make hiring successful. My background, just so to cover that really briefly, I was the first recruiter here at Abnormal before then I worked in big tech, pretty heavily for the last decade.

These are all gonna be just learnings that I've picked up along the way, not exclusive to abnormal, but definitely a lot of good jumps that we found working and what's not working here, but. Things just as a quick recap, what you covered last time was the post-interview process, really getting candidates across the finish line.

And again, I'm gonna keep coming back to this point, cuz it's the point of this lesson, but all of these steps that you learned last week or in our last lesson are really a partnership. Every single one of them should be done in partnership and lock step with the hiring manager and the recruiter. To go into, to start, I do wanna lay the framework on why the partnership matters and making sure that you set up the team for success here. So really to go into that, there's kind of two points that I really like to drive home with both hiring managers and recruiter: recruiting is a team sport.

This is an analogy that we hear all the time at every size and shape of company I've ever been at. It is true. Not one person can just own recruiting, unless maybe you're the hiring manager and it's a 20 person startup and you are maybe wearing five hats at a time at that stage and you are a recruiter. But we are gonna talk about how to scale when that starts happening, what that means.Some people ask why can't recruiting, just do it? Isn't it, your job? And that's really what I do wanna make sure we are clear on. 

Number one, hiring manager can't be replaced. We are hiring for your team. At the very beginning of a startup stage, perhaps you're doing both the job of the recruiter and the hiring manager, a recruiter cannot just serve you hires cuz they don't know what you need so they need to understand your team culture. What is the job that you're looking to fill? What's the job that you need to be done? How are we going to actually evaluate and effectively test for the skills that you need? You're the subject matter expert on the actual team work that's being done, and you're gonna be the one evaluating this person once they're an employee and helping set them up for success in their life cycle with you as an employee. That requires you to be very involved in the hiring process. If a recruiter, just hands you hires you're setting up everyone for probably the wrong hire, really misalignment on partnership of this employee coming onto your team, and maybe we're not actually gonna be able to see all the needs that your team is gonna need to be able to fill this gap that we're trying to hire for. 

You're gonna have to build your team over time. I would always encourage you to have at least 10 to 20% of your time set aside for recruiting. Create this as a part of your job and make sure that you're creating that space and expectation with your leadership. So what's the point of having a professional recruiter on your team?

This is, at this point, hiring at any type of scale is a full-time job. So the reason you bring in a recruiter and I'm gonna talk next a little bit about the actual time you bring them in, but let's say you're ready to scale. You need to hire in bulk, maybe a few people more than one, a quarter kind of thing. More one to three. Either way, what we do here is somebody is the owner. They are owning the process, owning the candidate experience, making sure this is getting touched every single day. You're also a consultant, the business, and, change in recruiting over the past 10 years has been moving from admin, which is just the nitty gritty… Let's get people scheduled, making sure people are moving along, know the process, all that kind of stuff to also consulting, being business partners for you. So helping you understand: what does the market look like? How do we be competitive? How do we make sure that this is the best process?

That's really the goal with that efficiency in hiring. And you can measure that with just overall data and making sure that we're making good choices along the way. The other piece, I think overall, these, this is a partnership, but this gives ownership over to recruiting to drive. And that's something that you'll have to hand over to them as a hiring manager and they will rely on you to help make the decisions of what you need. Cuz only you can say that. 

We wanna talk about building the right team for your goals to make sure that you are set up for success in hiring. Before we go into that, let's talk about all the different roles in recruiting. This is the average growth of a talent acquisition team over time, depending on how fast you scale. Thinking about all of these, this isn't a hard and fast rule.It's just based on my experience over time, but to kinda step back for a moment. Hiring manager is the person that's actually making the decision for hiring. They are the person in charge of managing this person once they become an employee. You're hiring for your team so it's, you have to be a part of the process the entire way through. 

Interviewers. Really this is who's gonna help evaluate this candidate if you're very early stage, maybe 10 people, you might be doing the job both of hiring manager and interviewer and recruiter, and all of it. But at a minimum, you're gonna need hiring managers and interviewers to make sure that you're able to both manage this person once they join the team and evaluate this person. A recruiter is typically going to be running the hiring process. We start to bring this in as we scale, but they would be the person directly responsible for running the interview process, helping bring in candidates, helping make sure that somebody is owning hiring. So they do everything from beginning to end. Building candidate pipeline all the way to closing candidates and helping them join. 

A sourcer: this would be someone that's really responsible for building pipeline. When I say pipeline, that's really helping make sure that we are talking to enough people to make a hire. So they help bring volume. You would usually do this when you're scaling truly. A recruiter typically is expected to source, and should be doing that at earlier stages especially, but in most jobs I've seen a recruiter is capable and expected to source on their own as well. A sourcer is supplemental because we need to hire so much. We need to talk to so many more people. It's important to bring that one in as a full-time job or even contract things like that.

A Coordinator, this would be someone that is really responsible for helping set up interviews, scheduling, coordinate the entire process internally and externally, both with the interviewers and the candidates to make sure everybody knows where you need to be and when. These interviews don't happen without coordination. A recruiter is capable of coordinating as well, it just is not always the best use of their time depending on the volume that they need to work in. So, when you start to get underwater and you're spending all your time coordinating and we're not talking to enough people, you should think about bringing in a coordinator.

Lastly, recruiting operations is something that you wanna build and bring in maybe when you're a little bit bigger, at over a hundred people, maybe 250-ish is when I've typically seen it come in. But what this does is really focus on operational excellence. What systems and tools are we using?

Recruiting operations is really managing all of it. Touching it all together to make sure that people are working really smoothly as a function, right? And we're thinking about the future and building an actual engine for recruiting so that we can really be thoughtful and intentional with how we hire.This is not a hard and set fast rule. It really depends on your ability to hire, but this is usually when I've seen. Your recruiting strategy is gonna need to change over time as you scale. So leverage the strengths that you have, as appropriate too. Depending on who, maybe like the co-founder or the hiring manager, they are a recruiter, very early on and their strength in hiring really determines the needs for these types of things.

This will grow over time. I would say also plan for maybe six months ahead, at least, when possible. Hiring takes at least one quarter to ramp and get going, but it usually takes six months to find a good cadence process that you have to build. So that's the big, high level overview of building the right team. And once you have your team in place and what do we do from there?

I do wanna move forward into how we work together and partner once you have the right team in place. I would always start, and encourage folks to start, with the recruiting kickoff call. You probably saw this in the lessons before but overall it's how do we kickoff hiring to make sure that we're on the same page and we know what to expect of each other? We have DRI, people that are responsible for certain tasks and know who's gonna do what, when. This is the big piece that you're gonna look for. This isn't a hard and fast one, but I wanted to give just an overall example of what I would cover in an initial call with a manager to make sure I understand: What's the role you're looking to fill? What is the goal here? What's the big picture? So I can share that with candidates. What are we gonna do to interview this person? What's the process we're gonna follow? Let's lay that out early so that it's clear. We're not having to change along the way, and we know how to evaluate a person. We've already talked through that.

How often, how fast do we talk? How fast should we expect results? Timelines are big ones of how fast can we get feedback in? How fast can we make an offer? I talk about speed because if you're recruiting in the startup world, speed is your competitive advantage. It's probably the biggest one that you have. So making sure that you are aware of that and take advantage of that is going to be a really big piece that will help you win when it comes to recruiting. 

So we will move forward - thinking about the different roles, every player on the team. And when I think of a recruiting team, to me, that's a recruiter, a hiring manager at a minimum. And maybe a sourcer. If the sourcer is involved, they should be really like brought in as a team as well, so that they understand. But when we think about it, each person has a different role and objective. When things get messy it's because people are maybe working two of the jobs, are thinking a little bit of wanting ownership in one piece that should be in a different swim lane. So create your swim lanes and make sure that we're clear on who's doing what. 

Recruiter drives the process end to end. They are making sure everybody's clear on the roles. They're like the directors of the hiring process. They make hiring happen. A sourcer is building volume in the hiring funnel. And when I say that, bringing people in, so we talk to more candidates. Again, the more candidates you talk to, the more likely you are to make that hire. Hiring manager. We need you to make decisions. We need to make sure people know how to interview this person, both internally. And we need to make sure recruiting and sourcing knows who you're looking for. So really helping drive that clarity is the best thing you could do for the team.

So these are all just kind of pieces that I would add to like just general tasks that need to be done on a weekly daily basis. Really set goals, accountability, for each one of these things. When you think about who owns what, this helps drive clarity. So people are not confused, waiting and making sure nothing happens. Sometimes things get stalled out because nobody took initiative or ownership of one of these things. Or two people were doing things at the same time and didn't talk to each other. The best relationships I've seen are folks, where recruiter and hiring manager are talking almost daily. Checking in regularly.

It doesn't have to be super formal but it's something that you touch often and never let get stale. So make sure that you really touch on this regularly and you're really communicating and collaborating as a partnership; people know their roles and move this forward. With that, creating working agreements, SLAs, just again, not just who, what are we gonna do? But by when is another big piece. Every task that we had on there should have an SLA tied to it. And this is really just to drive accountability. Hey, we did an interview, I should have feedback within 24 hours. Hey, we finished an onsite, how fast can we get an offer out? What is the SLA? What's too long? Let's create standards of excellence, agree on those and hold ourselves accountable to 'em. That ensures that we're always moving consistently, creating a good hiring process and really following it. So these are the big pieces that would need to be done. overall, you'd see tasks for recruiting or moving candidates through the pipeline, owning candidates, communication, really driving clarity for that candidate the entire way through. We don't want them confused on what's the job I'm looking at and how am I gonna be? What can I expect of the hiring process? Their experience with the company depends heavily on this and their decision to join or not is really gonna be a big reflection.

Always think about every single player within this. The candidate comes into play there too. And why this makes sense? Why would we, why would I wanna join? And what am I gonna get out of it? So we wanna create a great value proposition on all sides for this, but especially for the candidate. ‘Cause we should always think about closing along the way, especially again with early stage startup.

You need those people to wanna join and they're taking a huge risk to join you. And a lot of folks will wanna do that and will, and, jump in a great early stage employees, but you gotta find those people and spend the time on them to make sure that they really see that opportunity. 

Last stages that we're thinking about is actually iterating on the hiring process, executing together. All of those pieces of setting that expectation, making sure we know who does what, are all pieces that help set us up for success. 

The most expensive part of an interview process is the onsite. Here, again, you have different roles on how to set up an onsite for success recruiters, focus on the candidates, make sure you prep your candidates. You help them understand “what am I interviewing for? Are we aligned on everything at this point?” I do a prep doc and this is just an example of one. This is open to the public, but it's a very easy one that just covers some of the areas that we typically cover in a huddle. For me, a huddle would be the hiring manager, recruiter, and internal team, discussing 15 minutes. Take just a few minutes to discuss role, make sure everybody's clear on what we're interviewing for. So this is just a quick, easy checklist of “what is this candidate like? What should we talk about? What are we testing for? What do I need to make a decision here?”

Last thing I would always do a post huddle. So a post huddle is just an overall brief discussion, ideally, same day as the interviews that happen for the onsite, whether it's virtual or not, take 15 minutes and make a hire/no hire decision. In person is the best time. This is the most valuable thing we could pull out of every interview because, making this, getting this feedback together, aligning as a team, helps interviewer calibration. Always learn from every yes and no. Just because it's a no doesn't mean we shouldn't take five minutes to talk about it. This is a great time to iterate and make sure we're improving our process over time. Complete these in person, if you're gonna do something async, maybe the pre huddle, I would still, no matter how calibrated we are on the role, complete the post huddle in person. 

Last things you should always make sure that we are reviewing for effectiveness. And this is something that I would do even on a weekly basis. At a minimum at, on a monthly basis. You don't wanna get to the end of the quarter and wonder “what did we do wrong? Why did we not hire?” How do you do that? Have a few easy metrics that you're looking at on a regular basis to measure “are things working in hiring?”. So these are my general metrics that I like to look at personally.

When I'm hiring for a req, do we have enough volume to make a hire? [Green] 10 plus. I always aim for about 10 to 20 people per requisition or per job that we're hiring for. Yellow: five to 10. We're building pipeline but we need to be sourcing, right? Under five people: that's the danger zone for me. So I always encourage at least to be thinking about what are we doing and what do we need to change to get that to yellow or green. So I look at the candidate volume per rec every single week. So general rules of thumb: 25% pass through ratio from onsite to offer. If I have four onsite and one, I don't get one offer out of that. Do we know what we're really looking for? Are we testing it in the right ways? Things like that. Are hiring managers happy with 80% of the candidates presented, at least? Ideally this would be a hundred percent. We would, we should know what you want. But if we're not doing at least 80%, we need to do a recalibration meeting and really go over the profile and understand “how are you looking at it?”.

Last things, are the interview feedback matching the decisions from the huddles or are we convincing ourselves otherwise. When we talk it through, did we find other clarity? What do we need to change? 

Pulled along that journey too and don't have to go through the same growing pains as we did earlier on. Last thing is always timeliness. You're always gonna see time to fill, time to hire, is like a great metric. And it really just enables us to make sure that we're moving fast. We're making fast decisions and we're clear on what we need. So always think about “how can I be more efficient here? How can we move a little bit faster? What do we need to do?”. 

Wrapping this up. I would think about always learning from hiring decisions. I've said this a few times already, but we wanna learn from every yes and no. It's important to make sure that you continue to iterate. You adjust. Every company's different. The humans working in it is different, and make sure you understand what's working for you. This is really gonna help you have a strong advantage in hiring.

So to recap this whole lesson: big things here, for the overall partnership, understand the value of a team, really build your team strategically. Make sure every role is needed and people understand what their swim lanes are. 

From there we align on expectations. Who's gonna do what by when, right? 

From here you will enable mechanisms for accountability. What are the tasks that are expected? Who's gonna do what again? By when? It's the same thing, but make sure we're very clear on “when can I expect this?”. What is it that you're expected to do? Create overall processes and these are systems that we follow to make hiring automatic in that way so you're spending time on the complex things. You do wanna automate what you can, whether it's a process, how we do things, so people know what to expect - there's no ambiguity there. 

Iterate early and often make sure that you're really reviewing and thinking critically about what you're doing. Something that might work this month might change in six months and it might not work anymore. So really make sure you're taking time to iterate. Just early and do it regularly. Never stop doing that. So make sure you take time to learn and grow together. Again, just be thoughtful on what we're doing, make sure that this is a process that's evolving, growing and attracting the kind of talent that you want. You wanna make sure that you're building a team that people wanna be a part of. So doing that is always, it's a great reflection of how you work together, how this company works. 

This is the end of this series. So just a quick recap on what we learned over the startup recruiting process. We had four lessons. You did Building Candidate Pipeline with ‘Fitz’, Running a Successful Interview with Kevin. Really, how do you close up the process and close that candidate with Maria and focus on the Hiring Manager and Recruiter Relationship today. 

This concludes our lesson. Thank you for attending the lesson on the recruiting startup process here at Abnormal Business School. I hope you're able to learn something new today, and I wish you a good rest of your day.

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