Unchallenged assumption #6 Managers hire for their area
Unchallenged assumption #6 Managers hire for their area
It seems logical that each manager hire for their area. But sometimes situations call for a different approach. Why and when?
In the introductory post for this series, I introduced the idea of unchallenged assumptions in organisations that had become so accepted as the way work is done that they become very difficult to challenge, even when doing so would be very impactful:
The unchallenged assumptions I had identified were:
Managers hire for their area.
There are others, and I encourage you to share your examples in the comments, but these were the most prevalent ones I’ve experienced.
Managers hire for their area
It is generally expected that managers oversee the hiring of vacancies with the support of the human resources department. This widespread practice has led to the terminology of ‘hiring manager,’ generally, the hiring manager is also the eventual manager (also known as ‘line manager’ as the reporting line from the new employee goes to that manager on the organisational chart).
In organisations that primarily or exclusively use functional separation as an organizing principle, related skills will be clustered under functional managers. Thus, the functional manager might often be one of the most experienced members of that skills cluster. As with the other unchallenged assumptions, the assumption is not a problem. It only becomes a problem when conditions change sufficiently that a different approach is warranted.
The result can be a very inconsistent candidate experience for prospective employees and a lot of room for faulty reasoning around hiring decisions.
Better hiring practices can mitigate the challenges organisations face regarding poor-performing employees.
The assumption
The assumption is that the manager is best placed to decide on what is required regarding new team members. This may be true in many scenarios, but they may also have shorter-term incentives than the organisation to make hiring decisions.
A full-time hire is a significant commitment for the organisation and the new employee. Organisations often get themselves into cycles of over-hiring and then significant reductions or ‘transformations,’ i.e., where they change the structure to reflect current market needs better and usually also reduce the number of people in the organisation to remove less relevant skills and roles.
Organisations regularly find themselves in these cycles because they are less able to adapt gradually and thus leave such changes until they are long overdue. By this point in time, the changes are unavoidably vast and shocking.
There are also assumptions about talent being effective soon after joining an organisation. Of course, in most organisations, if you ask around, you will be informed that most people struggled to make an impact in fewer than six months for a variety of reasons such as the quality of the onboarding process, getting familiar with systems, understanding how work gets done in the organisation, essential interactions their team relies on and so on.
Of course, there are plenty of situations where group hiring may not be a fit due to high degrees of specialisation, heterogeneity, and a lack of adequate role concentration to justify the investment.
The alternatives
Group or central hiring
There are opportunities where roles may be standardised or numerous within an organisation, and group hiring might be an option. This is mainly where the organisation may have some homogeneity of role types to provide sufficient hiring demand to bring multiple new hires into the same roles.
Group hiring can provide a more consistent experience for candidates and better hiring decisions for the organisation, improving the talent experience, which can enhance word of mouth about your organisation in the talent marketplace.
In many organisations with significant software development or data science teams, there often will be enough roles of each type and level that centralising hiring may offer some benefits such as:
Addressing some hiring bias issues (especially when paired with relevant training).
Maintaining a pipeline of candidate cohorts and concentrated periods of acquiring, interviewing and selecting candidates to hire.
Maintaining a better experience standard for talent and prospective talent across the process.
Build up hiring as a competency for team members motivated to do this well.
Not be restricted to the manager class to support the hiring process.
This involves training up a recruitment panel and designing a recruitment process and consistent talent experience. Roles are hired, onboarded (which may include training) and allocated where needed rather than triggering a hiring process for each open role.
When we say central hiring, it may be central in the way HR often is, but the hiring panel where this hiring responsibility is an extra hat. This may not be central to the organisation but a hub within the organisation. For instance, a hub of engineering and data science competencies. This hub-like approach can then support different talent acquisition campaigns and adjustments to the process that are more appropriate for the hired roles, etc.
Rather than trying to multi-task across their primary job responsibility, they might focus on this intensely and then return to their primary team.
“Pipelining” hiring
To “Pipeline” hiring, is to hire according to an overall projection of hiring needs over a period such as annually or quarterly. Attrition rates and times of the year when attrition occurs can be reasonably predictable for medium-sized organisations. Thus, the rate of hiring and the breakdown of roles and seniority needed can also be reasonably predictable.
Hiring in this way is continuous (although some activities can be more concentrated at specific points, allowing for participants of the hiring process to focus on this activity before returning to focus on other activities) and also in tune with when talent is available rather than when organisations need it. When open roles trigger hiring, it guarantees periods of teams being at less than full strength for some time, maybe 3-6 months for hiring, in addition to 3-6 months for team members to get a positive contribution. Being under strength for this time can be stressful for affected teams, even if the environment supports adjusting expectations.
This practice can be an excellent complement to the group hiring approach described above.
Improving onboarding
The other area of investment that complements the above practices is investments to improve the onboarding experience for the hired talent. Once the recruitment process has been enhanced to provide word-of-mouth sharing of positive experiences, even for unsuccessful candidates, it makes sense to continue to carry the improvement into the onboarding experience.
This includes ensuring you resource all talent adequately with the right tools. In the earlier post, I gave the example of companies under-supporting their talent with tools and software to excel at their roles primarily due to how they account for these costs. Suffice it to say, resource the talent properly, even if it means hiring fewer people to afford it.
Have you had experience with any of these approaches? What was your experiences? Share in the comments.