This is both unsurprising and an interesting reframing of how we think about whose job it is to hire talent -- specifically eng talent. Any time I see the recruiting machine kick in at a company experiencing hypergrowth, I brace myself for the anti-patterns that inevitably appear https://twitter.com/jilljubs/status/1273047249724022784

First off, managers are incentivized to build big teams more often than they're incentivized to build balanced, sustainable teams. To grow thoughtfully and in full control of your process means to kneecap your own career advancement. I said it.

Managers are also not really incentivized to be that involved in the hiring process, even though recruiters practically beg for a partnership. Many young managers I talk to in larger organizations think a recruiter's job is to hand them candidates that are moving to offer.

This is broken!!! And this is why candidates have a bad experience. You go through the trouble of interviewing, only to find out that you're being shopped around to whoever can find a spot for you. Or that there is no spot for you. Makes you feel wanted, doesn't it?

This setup also means that managers who desperately need folks or are being pressured to staff their team are likely to take whoever is in front of them, without thinking too hard about their skill alignment and whether there's adequate mentorship on their team.

It also means that sometimes managers are *forced* to take a candidate who signed an offer without a confirmed team, just because they have the open headcount. Happened to me multiple times, and it's unfair to everyone involved when they don't work out.

Also, let's talk about how this plays out for recruiters. Recruiters are evaluated on many things, but ultimately the number of people they hire determines whether they get converted to full time, get promoted, or are terminated.

(This is also largely why making your recruiting team responsible for diversity never works -- lol @ recruiters getting docked for their pipeline diversity while managers get a pass for their homogenous teams that push out anyone who is different. I digress.)

Anyway recruiters literally just want to please the hiring managers they work with and give them the right candidates efficiently. But in high growth companies, they might be working with an entire org of managers, or switching around frequently to wherever the greatest need is.

And if you're a manager who's not actively cultivating a relationship with the recruiters you work with, they're going to be guessing at your team's needs, or looking for very generic skills, or working off a stale list of requirements. Which is always terrible for a candidate.

And terrible for the recruiters who build actual relationships with candidates, too. When they get someone through the process, and the hiring manager decides they are actually looking for something different, the recruiter now gets to deliver that message and look incompetent.

At my last job right before I left, I tried to make it a rule that Leadership Recruiting wouldn't help you hire a manager if you didn't provide them with a basic list of requirements. Does that sound wild to you? I wasn't totally surprised. IDK if that was implemented.

BTW the recruiters LOVED this idea. They'd been asking for it. But they didn't have the power to make it a rule until someone in leadership in the org they supported said it should be one. To me, that signaled a lack of power over THEIR OWN WORK. That's not a partnership.

And while I'm ranting, let's talk about hiring committees. My last company actually launched a hiring committee that didn't *totally* suck, and that's mostly because we trashed the concept of shutting hiring managers out of the conversation.

Every other hiring committee I've seen or participated in has had an express purpose of making decisions without the hiring manager's input, for "consistency" and "bar raising". Wild, right? Your company hired you to build a team & then told you they couldn't trust you to do it.

Nothing made me feel less empowered and less accountable as a leader than having to leave my hiring decisions up to a faceless committee who purposefully shut me out.

I also served on one of these committees, and I swear with every candidate I was like, "IDK is the hiring manager cool with these skill tradeoffs? What does the rest of their team look like?" I think everyone hated me, lol. But really who am I to say what they need???

So in this setup your recruiter now has to guess at what the hiring manager needs, *and* has to understand what the committee is optimizing for, all so that we can avoid holding managers accountable for their teams I guess??? At what point do we realize this is bonkers.

IMO if your candidate experience sucks, before you blame a recruiter, you should look at your hiring managers. Are they holding up their end of the partnership? Does it even look like a partnership?

Are your managers actually accountable for the quality and diversity of the teams they build? My experience says, largely, no. All of the incentives are in direct conflict. If you fix your incentive structure, you'll have happier candidates and better teams.

I do think there's space to reimagine the role, but as @jilljubs says it means putting the onus (and the accountability!) on managers. I think that's where it has to start. And that can be done now, as long as you're also willing to rethink what you value and reward in recruiters

I might give individual recruiters a hard time on here when they come at me sideways, and maybe I should stop. But I do have a deep love and respect for the function, and the work they do is rarely seen and appreciated fully by the leaders they serve.

@jilljubs what the hell did you just activate in my brain to make me go off like that? lol, I think this one's been simmering for a while.