Turning hiring managers into recruitment partners

Hiring managers are often cast as the weak link in candidate experience. Slow to shortlist, slower to give feedback, and strangely quiet once the offer goes out.

That reputation is mostly unfair. In the third and final webinar in our candidate experience series, Giles Heckstall-Smith, our Director of Strategic Partnerships, sat down with Scott Baxter, Head of Talent at SpaMedica, and Diana Read, Organisational Design and Development Lead at St Helens Council, to work out what is really going on. Almost no hiring manager sets out to give someone a bad experience. What they lack is context, visibility and a reason to care. All three are fixable.

The problem is understanding, not attitude

Scott was direct about the root cause. Hiring managers do not see recruitment as a critical metric for their part of the business, so they do not treat it like one. "It's almost ignorance, if you like," he said. "Very few hiring managers are purposefully trying to create a bad candidate experience. In fact I don't know any."

The fix starts with education. Managers rarely see the whole process, so they need to know where the handover points are, who does what, and what has already been invested by the time a shortlist lands on their desk. Advertising budget. Screening time. And, crucially, the candidate's own effort.

Diana framed it differently, and the framing matters. At St Helens the shift has been to treat appointments as core operational success rather than an HR admin task. Recruitment stops being something HR does to managers and starts being something managers own, with HR advising.

Start with the advocates, not the resisters

Both guests landed on the same tactic: do not try to convert everyone at once.

Diana's example was talent pooling. St Helens uses the talent pool functionality in Jobtrain to retain details of strong applicants who were not appointed, the silver medallists. A handful of engaged hiring managers tried it. It cut resource gaps and removed the need to run a whole new campaign for the next vacancy.

Word spread on its own. "When other hirers and services started finding out about the successes that some areas were having with the talent pools, lots of services wanted to be involved," Diana said. It is now mainstream practice, and nobody had to enforce it.

That is the pattern. Prove it with a small group, let the results do the persuading, then widen out.

Make the bottleneck visible

You cannot fix what nobody can see. Two examples stood out.

The first is hiring manager review time. In SpaMedica's early days of automation, Scott put time-to-offer, time-to-hire and hiring manager review time into board and senior leadership reports. Once "how long has this been sitting with the hiring manager" became a number that leadership looked at, behaviour changed.

The second is the advert deadline. For decades, St Helens waited for the closing date, then sent applications to the manager. Now managers can see applications as they arrive. For hard-to-fill roles, that means progressing a strong candidate while the advert is still live rather than losing them to a faster employer. Diana described the HR role in that as spotting the arrival and picking up the phone: did you know this one has landed, worth a look. Do that a few times and it becomes a habit.

Approvals and interview scheduling were the other bottlenecks named. Both used to run on spreadsheets, email chains and sign-off nobody could track. Putting them in one place with visible progress removed most of the frustration, and a good chunk of the delay.

The offer is not the finish line

Onboarding got more airtime than anyone expected, and rightly so. It is where the most candidates drop off.

Diana called the gap between offer and start date the "cricket period". We have always called it the black hole. Either way, it is a quiet, anxious stretch during which a competitor can still make a better offer, and often does.

Her advice is to use the information already in front of you. If an offer was sent two weeks ago and still has not been signed, that is a signal, not an admin backlog. Pick up the phone. When an onboarding task stalls, there is usually a simple explanation, such as a social worker who cannot find the original copy of a qualification certificate. Nobody finds that out by waiting.

There are three parties in onboarding and all three carry responsibility: the candidate completing tasks, HR handling compliance, and the hiring manager holding the relationship. That last one is the manager's moment to shine, because this is the person who will be on their team.

Feedback is still the industry's sore point

Second only to hidden salaries as a candidate complaint, and it has not shifted in twenty years. Diana pointed to the interim Milburn report on young people, which highlighted the social impact of feedback even for unsuccessful applicants.

Scott's team has made progress with a practical change. Interview notes for Teams interviews are now captured using AI scribing, which speeds up the write-up and makes feedback far easier to produce. SpaMedica operates under CQC regulation, so notes are mandatory and no offer goes out without them. Taking the friction out of note-taking took out a real bottleneck.

Where to start

We asked both guests for one piece of advice for anyone rebuilding their hiring manager experience from scratch.

Scott said data. Find the pinch points before you design anything, because the numbers tell you which stage actually needs attention.

Diana said co-design. Data plus lived experience plus listening to what people tell you. Nothing kills engagement faster than a process designed elsewhere and imposed on the people who have to use it. The same logic applies to candidates: if you are trying to improve candidate experience without asking candidates what they want, you have a problem.

Then, from both: have a bit of fun with it.

Next step: download our guide to building better hiring manager partnerships and join us on 16th September when Gary Towers, our Director of Talent Intelligence, shares the latest candidate insights report drawn from over 10,000 candidate responses.