Neil Morelli
Recruiting for technical roles can be challenging. There are often too many roles to fill, too many or too few candidates to interview and not enough time to get it all done and develop relationships with your key stakeholders: Hiring managers and the executive team.
Working with talent acquisition (TA) leaders and technical recruiters can help companies scalably, accurately and fairly assess potential candidates’ technical skills to fill high-value engineering roles. Technology also offers many advantages that help achieve TA objectives. But in my experience, many TA and HR leaders get frustrated when new tools fail to launch or deliver underwhelming results, because they aren’t adequately adopted, trusted or utilized by end users.
All of this leads to technical decision-makers and stakeholders developing a natural skepticism for mechanical or automated hiring tools. If your hiring managers seem doubtful about using tech for hiring, here are three strategies to help them embrace hiring tools.
Expect skepticism, it’s natural
Researchers studying how to make scientific hiring tools more effective have discovered an interesting phenomenon: Human beings are naturally skeptical of tools that outsource our decisions (Highhouse, 2008). Left to our own devices, we are hardwired to trust gut instinct over external data points, especially when developing and nurturing new relationships, including who we work with.
Scientists have offered up a few explanations for this preference of gut over data. Some people consider external, mechanical decision-making aids as less trustworthy because of a lack of familiarity with how they work, or because using them reflects poorly on the decision-maker’s value and worth as a leader or manager.
It could also be because there’s a fear of surrendering control and agency to a tool that doesn’t seem to consider or understand context clues. However, research has shown that people make better choices when using mechanical decision support tools than when either humans or mechanical tools make decisions alone.
It’s important to expect some natural skepticism. This is how our brains are wired and it’s not the hiring manager’s lack of faith in the TA expert. Where a TA leader sees an obvious boon to hiring KPIs from using a tool, the hiring manager might see a surrender of control and intrusion into their development team. Empathizing with this simple fact can help provide the right framing when introducing new tools internally.
Invite hiring managers to vet or implement new tools
It can be easy to get defensive about a new tool or process, especially after spending the time to get a budget, convince executives, vet the tool and go through procurement. So it can be easy to bristle when end users question the tool being recommended.
Executives, directors and other stakeholders are often consulted and involved during technology procurement and implementation, but end users are mostly left out of the decision altogether or are only involved after decisions have been made. So it’s understandable for hiring managers to be skeptical or hesitant toward new tools that are introduced after they’ve been purchased.
It takes time to involve more people and we want to be careful that good ideas don’t suffer “death by committee.” Still, there are often simple ways to involve frontline decision-makers when vetting or implementing a new hiring tool. Here are a few examples:
- Give hiring managers and end users a role and voice in the buying process by inviting questions and hearing their concerns.
- Involve managers and end users in the implementation process through focus groups or other calibration methods.
- Include employees and managers in the benchmarking process when a new technical assessment is created.
These simple steps can help decrease skepticism and resistance by increasing hiring managers’ familiarity with the tool over time. They also help hiring managers feel that their standards are represented in the end product. Hiring teams that see their standards and work environments in the assessments they create have the easiest time adopting them.
Compare the benefits to status quo processes
In my experience, skeptical hiring managers often ask their most pointed questions when evaluating an assessment in isolation. Said differently, I find that hiring managers are more open-minded to “mechanical” or automated hiring tools if those tools aren’t evaluated on their own, but are evaluated relative to status quo hiring processes.
Status quo hiring processes often include traditional resume screens, phone interviews, technical interviews on a whiteboard and take-home tests developed in-house. Of course, these hiring practices come with their own limitations, biases and trade-offs. But these shortcomings are often ignored, explained away or taken for granted.
Overall, it is beneficial to meet users where they are by empathizing and acknowledging their natural skepticism. A TA leader should involve skeptics during the buying or setup steps so that they can learn about hiring tools and have their voices heard. However, TA leaders should not be afraid to point out the downsides of faulty “we’ve always done it this way” hiring practices and how those practices compare to the upsides of using new tools.
One way to do this is to try interviewing end users on what they would change about their standard hiring process and use the data as talking points when introducing the benefits and features of new tools. Ask your vendor for great stories of how other teams solved similar problems after giving the tool a try and tell these stories when introducing and promoting the tool within your company.
We know that data gathering tools add efficiency, consistency and accuracy to the important people decisions your business makes every day. With perseverance, understanding and the right information to back up data-driven decisions, we stand a much better chance of overcoming the natural skepticism that we all bring with us.
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