Skills-Based Hiring has a Hiring Manager Problem - Part 2

The Elephant in the room

What does the industry tell us, and what do leaders see every day.

Candidates are now AI-enabled. They use AI to write CVs, tailor applications and to optimise LinkedIn profiles. They use AI to prepare for interviews.

Recruiters are becoming AI-enabled too. They use AI for sourcing, screening, for taking short or long, and often poor job descriptions and making them better. Interview summaries and scheduling. Candidate communications. The repetitive stuff we always hear AI is primed for!

Organisations are investing vast sums of money and time into skills mapping, talent intelligence, skills ontologies, taxonomies and workforce planning. Yet the person making the final hiring decision is often operating the same way they were 10 or 15 years ago. It is a contradiction nobody wants to address.

We’re creating increasingly sophisticated hiring ecosystems around the one part of the process that remains largely unchanged.

What do Hiring Managers care about?

The reason Hiring Managers often don’t engage deeply with hiring quality is because hiring isn’t their job, or at least it isn’t what they are measured on. What motivates or keeps most Hiring Managers awake at night is?

• A slowing project.
• A missed deadline.
• An unhappy customer.
• A delayed product launch.
• Revenue targets.
• Operational performance.
• Productivity.

It’s not hiring. For many managers, recruitment probably represents less than 1% of their annual responsibilities. When they engage with hiring its often only when the ‘empty seat’ becomes painful. They don’t wake up excited about skills taxonomies; they wake up worried about delivering for whatever their business area expects.

Hiring Managers are asked to care about skills frameworks, skills architecture and talent intelligence when what they really care about is getting work done.

This is where I think the conversation needs to evolve. Skills-based hiring strategies won’t succeed without Skills-Based Hiring Managers. And that is the major challenge. Trying to convert Hiring Managers who have done the same practice for years or done it once a year. And it’s not their primary responsibility. But they ARE accountable for its quality.

How do you create Skills-based Hiring Managers.

• Do they know how to identify skills?
• Do they know how to separate essential skills from wish lists?
• Do they understand transferable capability?
• Can they assess potential?
• Can they interview consistently?
• Can they recognise bias?
• Can they provide timely feedback?
• Can they forecast talent demand?

If the answer to those questions is no, then it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your taxonomy is. It doesn’t matter how intelligent your AI is nor how advanced your assessment platform is - every hiring decision passes through a Hiring Manager.

So, who owns Hiring quality?

Recruitment functions are measured to death. Time to hire, Cost, Quality of hire, Velocity, Diversity metrics, Candidate experience, Hiring manager satisfaction, Source effectiveness, funnel conversion…. It’s a long list. There are a long list of measures, metrics, reports, dashboards and tools showing RAG statuses and charts. The list goes on (of course that’s if the tech works!)

So how many organisations genuinely measure the quality of their Hiring Managers?

Not their technical or operational performance, nor their sales performance. Their hiring performance.

I would guess very few.

And yet TA teams consistently tell the same story. The delay wasn’t caused by recruiters, it was caused by managers not reviewing CVs, cancelling interviews, taking weeks to provide feedback, wanting more CVs after a fought for shortlist, because you never know who else might be out there.

And yet when the metrics are reviewed, Talent Acquisition often gets the blame.

But who is measuring the Hiring Manager?

What if organisations measured Hiring Managers the same way they measure recruiters? Imagine every manager having visibility of:

• Quality of role briefs?
• Speed of CV review?
• Interview feedback turnaround.
• Time taken to provide interview feedback.
• Candidate experience scores.
• Interview completion rates.
• Diversity outcomes.
• New hire retention.
• New hire performance.
• Internal mobility hiring rates.

Suddenly hiring quality becomes visible and accountability exists. Hiring becomes part of leadership capability rather than an administrative task delegated to TA.

If hiring quality is genuinely important, surely accountability cannot sit solely with Talent Acquisition?

AI’s role

The industry often talks about AI replacing administrative work, repeatable and repetitive tasks. And that’s exactly what it should do. It should automate, remove scheduling, reduce manual screening, improve sourcing accuracy and speed, support assessment and create the efficiencies we crave. But is the administrative burden always sitting with recruiters? - surely it is sitting in the behaviours surrounding the hiring process.

• The delays.
• The indecision.
• The poor planning.
• The unrealistic expectations.
• The lack of engagement.

Technology can make recruitment faster, but it cannot make managers better hiring managers.

Is there focus on The Wrong Transformation?

I absolutely believe in skills-based hiring, and that AI will fundamentally change Talent Acquisition. I also believe technology will he recruitment to improve hiring outcomes.

But none of those things address one of the biggest concerns heard from TA leaders - that the operating model around hiring hasn’t evolved at the same pace as Talent Acquisition itself. The industry is focusing too much on the middle of the process and not enough on the beginning and the end.

The beginning is demand planning - the end is decision making, and both are overwhelmingly influenced by Hiring Managers. The irony is that TA discuss candidate behaviour, recruiter behaviour and AI behaviour, yet the biggest variable in hiring outcomes remains largely untouched.

So perhaps the next evolution isn’t better AI, or better taxonomies or assessment - the next evolution is finally addressing the elephant in the room - The Hiring Manager

Until organisations treat hiring capability as a core leadership skill and on a par with tech investment, they will continue to optimise around the edges while the biggest bottleneck in recruitment remains exactly where it’s always been.

At Udder, we've found that successful hiring transformation is rarely just a technology challenge. Increasingly, our conversations with HR and Talent Acquisition leaders are about adoption, change management, training and the behaviours that sit around the hiring process. A lot of the organisations we speak with don't struggle because they lack technology; they struggle because technology, process and people aren't aligned. Technology can enable great hiring, but people still deliver it.