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Why Hiring Manager Satisfaction is the Most Important Recruitment Metric

The recruitment process takes both time and money for any business. Having a recruitment satisfaction survey for hiring managers can help you identify any problems that occurred during the process. It’s also an opportunity to single out what worked well. You want to have an effective hiring manager survey that provides invaluable feedback for your HR department or CEO. 

The hiring manager is not a part of your HR department and instead is from the department looking to fill a vacancy. They work in partnership with your HR department and ultimately oversee aspects like the interview process and choosing the final candidate.  

Hiring Manager Satisfaction Survey Benefits

Recruitment metrics are a way of evaluating the hiring process to identify issues and see what your HR department is doing right. Having a recruitment satisfaction survey for hiring managers is the most effective way to analyze the success of your recruitment. While you may have ended up with the ideal candidate, the hiring process may not have been the best experience.

[Read More: Hiring Manager Satisfaction Survey Example]

You want to be evaluating the recruitment process as a way to make changes for the future. Hiring a new employee takes time, with the hiring manager having to take time out of their usual activities to take part in the recruitment process. While your HR department is dedicated to this task, your hiring manager is someone in your company who has other responsibilities and a larger role within your daily operations.

In this article, we’re taking a look at why hiring manager satisfaction is the most important recruitment metric. These surveys allow you to evaluate your overall recruitment process and make changes to create a more streamlined and efficient process.

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Here are five key benefits of using a recruitment satisfaction survey for hiring managers:

1. Hiring Manager Surveys Evaluate Your HR Department 

Not every employee knows how to be a hiring manager, especially if they’ve recently undertaken a leadership position. Your HR department should be working in collaboration with them to provide support throughout the recruitment process.

While the hiring manager goes through the applications and hosts the interviews, it’s the HR department that facilitates the process. As the CEO, you won’t be as involved in the process or as actively engaged with the HR department as the hiring manager.

The satisfaction survey may show that they felt they couldn’t be an effective hiring manager because the HR process was lacking. The best person to evaluate the performance of your HR department – and provide you with invaluable feedback – is the hiring manager.

2. Hiring Manager Satisfaction Surveys Ensure Quality of Job Descriptions

A job description is what attracts candidates to apply. Hiring managers know exactly what they are looking for in both their candidates and open roles so it’s up to them to write an accurate job description.

It’s the HR department to review job descriptions for consistency, tone, and appropriateness for the role, in addition to making sure it represents the company’s vision and mission accurately. The quality of your job descriptions will impact the candidates that apply for the position and the type of applications you’ll ultimately choose from.

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3. Provides Feedback for Quality of Applications Through Hiring Manager Surveys


The person who can best judge the quality of the applications you receive during the recruitment process is the hiring manager. They’re the person the successful candidate will be working for on a day-to-day basis.

Ideally, talent and experience are preferred, but most organizations would hire talent over experience. Just because someone has ten years of experience under their belt, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a better candidate than someone with less experience. You’ll often find companies like to take talented applicants and give them experience within their company to integrate them into their office culture and improve employee retention.

These factors should be fed into the recruitment process, under the direction of the hiring manager, who will ultimately decide whether it’s talent or experience that should be prioritized. 

Your hiring manager will be able to tell you whether the quality of applications was lower than expected. You might find that the job postings were not targeted to the right audience. The hiring manager can provide you valuable feedback on the quality of the application.

4. Correct Mistakes With Hiring Manager Satisfaction Surveys

Hiring manager satisfaction is the most important recruitment metric as they’re the individual most involved with the hiring process. As they are not a member of your HR department, they can provide you with information about where your recruitment process might be falling short. 

While the hiring manager can provide positive feedback, they can also tell you what they would like changed. They might feel like there wasn’t enough time for interviews, or they could feel like the hiring process took too long. Using a survey or questionnaire to examine your hiring manager's satisfaction can help identify and correct mistakes.

Although your HR department sets out the process, they’re not as actively involved with individual candidates as the hiring manager is. If your HR department deals with multiple recruitment processes a month, it’s easy for things to slip to the wayside and for mistakes to become common practice.

5.Create A More Effective Hiring Manager Through Feedback

A recruitment satisfaction survey for hiring managers works both ways. While it’s an opportunity for them to provide feedback on their experience with the HR department, it’s also a chance for them to self-reflect on their performance. Not every team leader knows how to be a hiring manager. It can take time and several recruitment processes for them to become comfortable with interviewing candidates and shortlisting applicants.

When you’re reviewing the feedback in the satisfaction survey, it gives you an overall view of the process from a unique point of view. Your HR department primarily facilitates the recruitment process, while the hiring manager is more directly involved with the applications. You can get feedback on how your HR department is performing while also getting the thoughts of your hiring manager. 

The survey can help you identify if the hiring manager will need more support the next time they’re involved in the recruitment process. They might have struggled to go through all the applications or would have liked another senior employee to have been in the interviews.

At Crosschq, our Talent Intelligence Cloud™ can improve hiring manager satisfaction by streamlining the process. We offer pre-hire assessment and digital reference checks, along with a candidate referral network and talent analytics to support your future recruitment processes.

Find out more about our Human Intelligence Hiring™ solutions by requesting your free custom demo here.

Lucas Sonini

by Lucas Sonini

Contributing Writer

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