Hiring Manager Satisfaction plays a crucial role in the recruiting process. Hiring managers are the ones who ultimately decide which candidates will be brought on board, and will directly work with them once they’re hired. An excellent hiring process should aim to provide hiring managers with a variety of high-quality candidates, while also making sure that they are actively involved in the selection and filtering of candidates.

Tracking Hiring Manager Satisfaction is a good way to help identify potential areas of improvement. One of the best ways to find out how hiring managers feel is through a Hiring Manager Satisfaction Survey. This is a survey that is uniquely tailored to hiring managers and their concerns, usually sent by the recruitment team following a successful hiring.

Sending a Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey allows you to better understand what hiring managers are pleased with, and what can be improved about your process. Recruiters and hiring managers working together closely is an increasingly important trend in the business world known as collaborative hiring.

Curious about the latest trends in Hiring Manager Satisfaction?

We've just released our new Hiring Manager Satisfaction Benchmark Report, which breaks down the data by company size, region, question theme, and more. You can read it here, or through the image below.

Hiring Manager Satisfaction ensures that the hiring managers and recruiters remain aligned throughout the recruitment process, and effectively cooperate to find the best possible candidates. High hiring manager satisfaction means that this relationship is strong, and that the candidates are of excellent quality. 

Why is sending a Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey so important?

Recruiters and hiring managers have to be able to work effectively together in order to maintain a high quality of hire. A bad hire can cost you tens of thousands of dollars, as well as a large amount of time and effort. Having a mismatch between recruiters and hiring managers also results in lower Candidate Experience, and raises the risk of poor hires.

Consider just one aspect of hiring: the job description. Our Candidate Values Report drew on 370,000+ candidate responses and found that one of the key predictors of a positive Candidate Experience was a clear understanding of the role. Having job descriptions that are accurate to the position is incredibly important. A proper Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey allows your hiring managers to evaluate if recruiters are on the right track, or if they require any course correction. 

Happier hiring managers means happier candidates

Smooth collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers looks great to your candidates, and helps you deliver an excellent Candidate Experience. They also give your recruitment department valuable internal feedback. Plus, happier hiring managers are more motivated to give engaging and upbeat interviews.

Around 30% of bad hires are caused by hiring managers being pressed for time, creating issues further down the road. One part of effectively aligning recruiters and hiring managers is setting a tolerant time table for both parties, and regularly checking whether any time pressure is felt. You also have to check in on a variety of other topics, which we’ll detail later in this article.

Having a data-driven methodology to assess Hiring Manager Satisfaction  and make sure that hiring managers are happy will take you a long way in optimizing your hiring process and lowering the risk of bad hires. It’ll also ensure that recruiters are properly positioned to seek out appropriate candidates and know how to improve your talent pipeline by efficiently coordinating with hiring managers.

Measuring Hiring Manager Satisfaction with a Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey

At the end of the day, the hiring manager will work closely with the new hire, and is responsible for evaluating the quality of hire. They should also reflect on the hiring process, and consider what aspects of it could be improved. But how can you measure Hiring Manager Satisfaction? How can it be quantified?

The easiest and most efficient way to quantify Hiring Manager Satisfaction  is by using a hiring manager satisfaction survey. This is a short survey asking hiring managers to evaluate the hiring process, and their experience with it. These are great tools for recruiting teams who want to make sure that they’re properly aligned with their hiring manages, and are providing them with suitable candidates.

Most of our customers send out a survey 1 or 2 days after the conclusion of the hiring process. The frequency is up to you to decide. Some of our customers send them out with every new hire, while others put a 1 to 3 month cooldown on these hiring manager satisfaction surveys.

Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey template

Alright, so you’ve decided you want to create a Hiring Manager Satisfaction  survey. This raises another question - what should you ask them? Where do you start? 

Thankfully, Starred is a solution that automatically collects, analyzes, and processes recruitment survey data. Our goal is to create fairer and more engaging recruitment processes. To reach that goal, we need to have happy hiring managers too. Hence, besides measuring Candidate Experience, we also specialize in collecting hiring manager feedback. We offer purpose-built, fully customizable surveys to allow you to understand how your hiring managers feel about successful hires.

In 2023 our customers saw an average NPS for hiring managers of 65! That's quite high and is a very healthy metric for gauging the state of their talent acquisition strategies.

We’ve created a survey template of useful questions that’ll quickly help you get started on measuring hiring manager satisfaction. These questions cover various categories, and together, they provide a comprehensive overview of all facets of hiring manager satisfaction:

These are open-ended questions, and respondents are encouraged to give both a quantitative score and a qualitative comment elaborating on their score. This results in well-rounded results, which can draw both on ratings and further explanations to underline how hiring managers feel. Each one of the following questions is measured on a 10-point scale.

You can access the free template here!

Survey Questions:

Partnership

1. How likely are you to recommend Recruiter X to other hiring managers? 
2. Why did you give this score?
3. Do you have other suggestions for how the team or process could be improved?

Role-Kickoff/Planning

1. Did the recruiter agree on an effective sourcing and recruitment strategy?
2. Did you agree on the structure of the interview process?

Recruiter Evaluation

1. Did the recruiter understand the role well?
2. Was the quality of their talent advice high?
3. Did they deliver on commitments identified at the start of the process?

Candidate Quality

1. Was the recruiter able to build a diverse talent pool?
2. Was the recruiter able to find high quality candidates that matched the role?
3. Did the candidates have a good understanding of the position and job requirements?

Recruitment Process

1. Was the interview scheduling process smooth and efficient?
2. Was the recruiter clear in communication, and did they regularly provide you with updates?
3. Were you aligned on the offer strategy with the recruiter?
4. Was the overall recruitment process quick and efficient?

Following our template helps you measure the most important areas affecting hiring manager satisfaction. This gives you a good overview of where you stand. It’ll also give you a good understanding of what parts of your recruiting process can be readily improved. Our surveys are fully customizable, so you can tailor them however you’d like. We also created a bunch of Candidate Satisfaction Surveys.

Visualizing Hiring Manager Satisfaction survey data

After the questions have been asked and answered, you have to visualize the data. We offer a fully-fledged dashboard that takes your raw data and processes it, making it easy to understand how your hiring managers are feeling at a glance.

Measuring Hiring Manager Satisfaction is becoming increasingly relevant to ensuring that your recruitment strategies are effective and worthwhile. Making a bad hire is costly, both in terms of time and money, and keeping your hiring managers happy helps you avoid that. It also keeps recruiters and hiring managers aligned, making the whole process much smoother. Sending out hiring manager satisfaction surveys is an excellent starting point if you’d like to understand how hiring managers feel.

Are you thinking about measuring Hiring Manager Satisfaction? Take a look at our Hiring Team Experience page to see why understanding hiring manager experience is crucial to having a complete overview of recruitment results. Alternatively, feel free to reach out so we can discuss how you can create a stronger partnership between your recruiting team and the hiring managers.