New Episode
Recruiters Aren't the Problem
with Sean Kennedy, Founder of Kennedy's Content
About This Episode
Recruiters get blamed for everything. Slow pipeline? Recruiting. Bad hire? Recruiting. Sun didn't come up? Probably recruiting. So we brought in Sean Kennedy — the guy who has spent the last year turning hiring dysfunction into LinkedIn comedy — to talk about the hiring manager relationship. Plot twist: Sean didn't come to roast hiring managers. He came to tell recruiters the truth.
His opening position: there are jerks on both sides of the hiring table, and a lot of recruiting's bad reputation comes from recruiters who never learned how to work with hiring managers. From there, the conversation gets practical fast. Sean breaks down the difference between being liked by your hiring manager and being respected by them (spoiler: being their beer buddy won't save you when “Tony” throws you under the bus in front of the C-suite), and why so many hiring managers assume a few interviews make them recruiting experts. His comparison: he's been on plenty of planes. He still can't fly one.
Then the playbook. Sean's three moves for becoming a real strategic partner: stop being a yes-person in the intake call, keep your receipts with a running change log of every process decision, and actually do what you said you'd do. Ashley adds the best counter to “we've always done it this way”: okay, and how's that going, since we're here backfilling the role? Sean also shares the time he built a Lord of the Rings slide deck to talk a hiring manager out of a six-stage interview process. It worked. Once.
The second half goes deeper. Desiree and Sean dig into why great recruiters become terrible recruiting managers (Sean volunteers himself as Exhibit A), the “conspiracy theory” that promoting top performers into management is just a cheaper way to stop paying them commission, and the uncomfortable reality that neither hiring managers nor recruiters were ever really trained for the jobs they're doing. Sean shares how one former manager made interview training a required part of onboarding for anyone expected to interview, and Desiree connects it to the training she runs with founders today.
They close on the human side: why the best recruiters are empathetic, what being on the job market taught them both about their own industry, and Sean's final advice, which fits in four words. Don't be a dick.
In this episode:
- Why recruiting's bad rep is partly earned, and what the good recruiters are up against
- Liked vs. respected: why being your hiring manager's buddy isn't the same as being valued
- The "I've been on a plane, so I can fly one" problem with hiring managers
- Ashley's pancake theory: if it's recruiting's fault when it goes bad, does recruiting get the bonus when it goes well?
- Sean's three moves: say no (and explain why), keep your receipts, follow through
- How to answer "we've always done it this way"
- The Lord of the Rings slide deck that shrank a six-stage interview process
- Why great recruiters become bad recruiting managers, and the promotion "conspiracy theory"
- How to get a ghosting hiring manager to give feedback: tell them you're pausing the search
- Why recruiters keep getting trained by people who stopped recruiting a decade ago
- Interview training as part of onboarding
- Agency as college, in-house as the real world
- Empathy, the job search wake-up call, and the nine-page CV that wasn't
Resources & Links:
- Sean Kennedy on LinkedIn
- Desiree's book, Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality
- Watch Talentless on The HR Channel on Roku and Fire TV
- Talentless newsletter, The T-Hive
- This episode's sponsor: JiMMYBAR — use code TALENTLESS for 15% off
Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Recruiters take the blame for almost everything, right? Whether the sun doesn't come up in the morning and go down at night. I believe hiring managers are part of the problems. So we're gonna talk about that and how this leads into recruiter burnout, scheduling problems — all the things. First, Sean — you've built a body of work making parodies out of recruiting and talent takes. But this is a real serious topic. Give me your overview of how you think about this.
Sean: No matter what industry you're in, some people are going to be dicks. There are just dicks everywhere in the world. Sometimes they are hiring managers, but also at the same breath, there are recruiters who are just as big a dicks. That's where the bad name comes from. Where recruiters have got a bad name is because they don't know how to work with hiring managers. Then hiring managers get frustrated and it becomes this big ordeal of “recruiters are just an add-on, they're not really super important, I don't see the value in them.”
Desiree: Getting yourself to be liked by — or valued by — a hiring manager is probably the key. But how do you actually do that? It's not just showing up to the intake and telling them they're beautiful and gorgeous.
Sean: There's a big difference between being liked by your hiring manager and being respected and having value shown. I've had hiring managers I thought were really good friends — and then on a call with senior stakeholders, I'd be like “Hey Tony, my man.” And Tony's like, “Sean, f*** off.” I showed him no value. I'd just shown him a guy he could get along with. You've got to really show why you're presenting certain candidates, meet them on their level, and remember: hiring managers assume that because they've interviewed a lot, they know everything about recruitment. It's like I've been on planes my whole life. I do not know how to fly one.