Hiring is a manager’s key responsibility

Q: You've identified 10 candidates for a position in your department. What should you do next?

Nick's reply: Many managers go out of their way (whether they realize it or not) to avoid doing their own recruiting and candidate selection. They seem to believe that they should devote their valuable time to the hiring process only after others have screened the job candidates.

It's a good idea to involve team members in the hiring process, but in my opinion it's a manager's job to personally take the lead and qualify the candidates. Leaving it up to the human-resources department is like washing your hands with gloves on.

Now, "team players" out there will argue that the manager should poll the team before deciding which candidates to interview. There are good arguments for this approach, including the idea that more input is better. But in my opinion, the manager should pick up the phone and make the first contact before anyone else gets involved.

This is the smart way to get the best candidates in the door as quickly as possible, and it's a great way to start to forging a relationship with the best candidates. When you personalize recruiting this early in the process, it puts you ahead of your competition. The problem at many companies is that a manager doesn't get involved until after a candidate has talked to two or three other company representatives first. In the meantime, great candidates might be lost to managers at other companies – managers who show an immediate personal interest.

It's also important for a manager to get a first look at candidates because good ones might get dismissed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In other words, if the people doing the screening aren't doing it right, the most important information about a candidate can be lost in the pre-processing.

The hiring manager is a much better interpreter of a candidate's qualifications than a personnel clerk. When the manager does the first "processing" of candidates, richer and more accurate information will be gathered – and it's likely the manager will identify the best candidate. The manager's judgment is the most important.

Some folks will disagree with this approach because it puts the candidate-selection burden on the manager. I'd argue that this is the point, because a manager's No. 1 job is finding and hiring great people. All this assumes, of course, that the manager knows the business better than anyone on the team or in the personnel office. It also assumes the manager will make the final hiring decision. If these assumptions are wrong, then there's also something wrong with the business itself.

Copyright 2008. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate

Nick Corcodilos is author of "Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job" and the host of www.asktheheadhunter.com. He can be reached by e-mail at seattle@asktheheadhunter.com or at North Bridge Group, P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833. Sorry, no personal replies.