[Reshare] Building Trust with Hiring Managers with Sr. Technical Recruiter, Ex-Twilio, Maria Fernanda

The reason your best candidates aren’t getting hired is because your team isn’t aligned.

Maria Fernanda, Senior Technical Recruiter, with past experience at Twilio and Brunel, joins Shannon to talk about the hidden costs of misalignment between recruiters and hiring managers. With experience leading global teams and building internal tools, Maria breaks down how trust and clarity change hiring outcomes.

She shares how to coach two distinct types of hiring managers and why both need different forms of support. The conversation explores how to set expectations, use internal data, and guide decisions when processes vary across cultures and company sizes.

Maria also reflects on the power of being human in high-pressure roles and why weekly syncs need clear goals to stay valuable.

Key takeaways:

1. Alignment drives results: Without shared criteria, even top candidates can get passed over.
2. Context is everything: Understanding your hiring manager’s background helps shape better communication and trust.
3. Recruiters are partners: Building influence starts with showing up as an advisor, not a task-runner.
4. Processes need explaining: Success depends on making sure hiring managers understand the why behind every stage.

Timestamps:
(00:00) What hiring excellence really means

(00:09) Introductions

(00:35) Guest profile: Maria Fernanda

(02:16) Why strong recruiter–hiring manager relationships matter

(04:25) Aligning multiple perspectives across a hiring team

(07:39) Two types of new hiring managers and how they differ

(10:12) Coaching seasoned managers new to the company

(13:38) Using real candidate examples to clarify alignment

(17:20) Building buy-in for unfamiliar hiring processes

(22:42) Helping new managers navigate ATS tools

(29:33) Adapting communication style to influence hiring decisions

Transcript

Maria Fernanda (00:00):

For me, hiring excellence is data baseline. And then you need the right tools to get that data, to have hiring excellence, to make the right decisions.

Shannon Ogborn (00:09):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting-edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

(00:35):

Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from C to IPO and beyond. I am so excited to be here today with Maria Fernanda. She started in tech recruitment 10 years ago. She's worked for agencies as a corporate recruiter and has even founded her own recruiting agency and she previously worked at Twilio supporting Latin America hiring and strategy, and she is currently global recruiting manager and talent advisor at a stealth startup. Maria, thank you so much for joining us today.

Maria Fernanda (01:13):

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Shannon Ogborn (01:16):

Yay. I'm so excited for you to be here too. And I would love if you could give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself, more specifically about what you currently are doing, obviously as much as you can tell us.

Maria Fernanda (01:29):

So right now I'm a global recruitment manager for a consultancy group. We work in Australia, Asia, Europe and Americas. So I manage a team of three recruiters right now and we hired for several industries and right now I'm also helping a startup to build a platform to help also recruiters and that's pretty much what I can tell, but I'm very excited. I'm also helping on the product side to understand what's going on in the market and yeah, pretty much it.

Shannon Ogborn (02:00):

Yeah, I mean needless to say, there's a lot going on in the market right now, but in terms of what you've seen as you've really progressed your career, what have you seen as some of the biggest challenges in hiring?

Maria Fernanda (02:16):

Well, I'm going to start by saying that recruitment industry has changed a lot in the past, I think five years. I think recruitment was a very stable market in the past, I don't know, probably 10, 15 years. It was pretty much a stable, but I think in the past five years we've seen and if you're a recruiter and you're listening to this, you've seen that it has changed a lot. But I think that what is consistent within the market is that amazing relationship that you must build with your hiring manager regardless of how the industry is going, regardless of the industry that you are in or what's going on within the market. I think it's even more key to have that good relationship with your hiring manager. For me during all these years and all these changes at the end is how you can influence your hiring manager to actually trust you.

(03:05):

For recruiters, it's pretty easy to kind of understand what's going on in the market. You are talking to candidates all the time, you're probably reading, you're probably engaged with what's going on. But we also need to understand that for hiring managers hiring, it's one of the probably thousand tasks that they have in one day. It's not that it's not their priority, but it's just one task. But recruitment is our complete task. So we need to understand that for them is just one of the things that they need to do and we need to kind of build that relationship of trust with them so that we can influence decisions based on what we are actually seeing on the market. And I think that's key to success to any kind of process, but it has been also my challenge during my entire career building that trust with them.

Shannon Ogborn (03:49):

Yeah, it's such a good point that you make on hiring managers, having so many other things to do As a recruiter, this is your life. You talk to candidates, you work with hiring managers, you send offers, you unfortunately have to reject candidates. You do all those things on a daily basis, that is your full-time gig and hiring managers, there's a whole nother world, but they have to look at. And I'm curious from your perspective, what is so important about hiring manager alignment and why should people really care about investing in this as part of their recruitment strategy?

Maria Fernanda (04:25):

Yeah, there's the story that I always tell to my junior recruiters because frustration is just part of our job. If you're a recruiter, you need to be aware that you're going to be frustrated most of the time. So when you are working with junior recruiters, it's very common. So I'm just telling them this story. So imagine you're in a room and there are seven, six people, same probably to the same piece of art, and you're going to ask the same question to those seven people and at the end, let's say they're looking for the piece of art for 15 minutes at the end, all of them are going to tell you total different things of what they sell and instead it doesn't question for everyone. And that's what happened with hiring managers. Usually if you see a normal process, let's say a regular processing has three or six people involved in into process and you need to align that criteria of probably six different minds, six different perspectives, six different backgrounds, and I think that's the most challenging part. I've always say to my team that recruitment is more about actually alignment, that actually finding the right candidate because it's different minds thinking totally different, but we need to agree on what we are seeing on the same candidate based on a XY criteria. So I think it's really important because otherwise if you don't align your hiring manager or your hiring team, you are going to find your unicorn. It's going to be there, but it's not going to get hired. You're just not aligned. Everyone is just thinking different about that.

Shannon Ogborn (05:53):

Yeah, I always think about recruiting as the glue to all of these perspectives because what we hear is we hear as a recruiter, we hear from the business what the business goals are. So we know that we hear from the executives what the executive goals are for a role, so we might know that we hear from the hiring managers what they know, and so we know that. And then we also can hear from ICs on the team or similar roles that we're hiring, what their experience is in the role. And so we hear that and so it's really our role as recruiters to pull all of that together and say like, okay, are we aligned on this or do we need to have further conversation? And it's kind of surprising how many times it is not aligned at all because everyone has such different perspectives.

Maria Fernanda (06:39):

And it's not like sometimes of course having an interview plan, like a structure interview and their criteria grid is very helpful, but it's our role to make that happen. Something that you just mentioned, we are the glue. If you do not have that goal as a recruiter, if your goal as a recruiter is not alignment, you're just coming back and forth with information, but there's no end of it, there's no going to be an end of that discussion because your goal isn't actually aligned. That criteria I make everything flow and seamless.

Shannon Ogborn (07:12):

Exactly. Help yourself by aligning is all I can say.

Maria Fernanda (07:16):

Exactly.

Shannon Ogborn (07:17):

Well, I know that we talked about on the note of hiring manager alignment and sort of coaching hiring managers. I know we talked about really two types of new hiring managers, so that's going to be our focus today. Two types of new hiring managers. Can you tell me what those are and how they might be different from each other?

Maria Fernanda (07:39):

We talked about two types of hiring managers and you're going to probably face both of them at the same time or at any point of your career you're going to do that. One is the net new hiring manager, so it's someone that has just been promoted from their IC role. They're very excited, very nervous. Probably their first task is hiring someone through your team. That's one challenging. But there's the other one who probably is a very seasoned hiring manager in any other company but is a new hiring manager for your company. So there's a lot of cultural alignment that you need to focus on there. Yeah, they have experienced hiring, but they have not experienced hiring at your company and your organization and your process. So there's another type of challenge there.

Shannon Ogborn (08:23):

Yeah. I don't know about you, but before we get into the tactical piece of how you coach each type of hiring manager, I'm curious which you have found more challenging to coach in your experience.

Maria Fernanda (08:37):

I think the new hiring manager on your organization, not the net new which has just been promoted because there's one thing about the ones that have just been promoted and is that they're excited as well. You need to understand that it's a new role for them. There's a lot of excitement and of course with that excitement comes this openness to actually learn because they understand that they're learning something new. But when there's a hiring manager that actually comes from an organization, I don't know, they have a lot of experience building teams. They have just built an entire engineering team and you are telling them how to do it on your organization, you are going to see a little bit more of resistance. They know how to do it. So I think that's the most challenging because they need to relearn something and hiring and that's another process.

Shannon Ogborn (09:24):

Totally. Yeah, the unlearning and relearning is such a critical piece because every organization hires so incredibly differently to align with their culture and what, especially from the top down, how they see hiring and view hiring. And sometimes the changes that hiring managers who are seasoned hiring managers who come into the org can make are for the better, but sometimes it's hard to just get their mind wrapped around, okay, I need to unlearn everything I learned at my previous organization. So jumping into coaching and aligning each type of hiring manager. Let's start with the new to org. What are some of the really big considerations to think about when you are coaching a seasoned hiring manager that is new to the organization?

Maria Fernanda (10:12):

So I think the first thing is to understand where they come from. And I think that's a task that we as recruiters need to have on our to-do list. I need to understand where these hiring manager is coming from because that's success and leveling in every organization is completely different. So they come with this mindset of what success was on the organization, what Engineering Level 1, 2, 3 was on the organization are probably so different on yours. So you need to understand what success for that hiring manager, do your homework, understand a little bit, make a little bit of market research and then have a little bit of reference profiles to understand that. And then based on that information, you need to coach them on what success means on your organization. So it's another type of conversation. It is not just a kick-off, it's just like, hey, I don't know, I talked to your HR VP, I just want to show you these successful profiles in this company on your team. These have been people that have been for reference for hiring and these were the XY things that we saw on these profiles that have made them successful in this organization. So you're kind of setting the tone on, hey, I'm here to help you also understand how it is our culture.

Shannon Ogborn (11:23):

The market research piece is very interesting. I think one of the interesting things these days is that companies put a lot about their hiring and recruiting culture on their website or on their careers page. And so it's actually easier now than ever to do the market research on how a company hires. So I think that's such a great point in that recruiters can do the upfront work to really understand what a hiring manager may not necessarily be able to articulate about the situation that they came from.

Maria Fernanda (11:58):

And also today, I mean I don't know what type of tools you as recruiter have, but there are lots of ATA that they have the record of information like, hey, these candidates are from XY company. And you can filter that on your ATA and you can actually see based on your company criteria why these people have been rejected. And that's something that you can also bring up to the conversation like, Hey, these people from this company have been rejected at our company because of X, YI, and it's you are teaching your hiring manager your culture in a different way instead of just walking them through the values. They have just been hired, they have them, they passed your recruitment process, but they now even understand how those that values are reflected on your hiring process from the other side. So I think that's very important.

(12:47):

And then that's kind of the cultural side of it, but there's another thing that is very important as you also recruit is setting up your role to that new hiring manager and also the process. You need to make sure that they understand the process on your company, which probably it's different, but also the reason of each stage of the process because their hiring managers are probably, they come from a small startup and they are used to be involved in every single profile, every call, every interview, and probably your organization is bigger. You don't have the time to go through every candidate with your hiring manager. So you need to explain them why every stage of their process have been created and you're like the reason not only, okay, step 1, 2, 3 because that's not how you build trust with a new hiring manager on your org.

Shannon Ogborn (13:38):

So one thing that you mentioned that I thought was a really good tactical piece was sort of being able to give the hiring manager sort of a taste a sampler of the types of profiles that you would bring to them for a role based on your experience at the organization. Can you walk us through a little bit of that?

Maria Fernanda (13:57):

I think there are two types of ways that you can do that. I just mentioned one, but so there are three. The first one is do a little bit of research. Probably you have your HR VP or someone inside the organization that knows that team, probably a previous manager or someone on a highly level that can help you out and bring those successful profile that I'll already there to that hiring manager and point out the things that have made them successful. So that's one thing. Let's say internal research. There's another one that I just mentioned as well and it's go to your ATS, look for profiles that have been rejected from XY company based on your conversation with the hiring manager and walk them through what have been happening. You can get that data, understand what are probably the most common pain points with those profiles and the hiring manager through that.

(14:49):

And then of course that but not least come prepared to your kick-off or conversation with your hiring manager. Bring people from outside your organization from other companies. Bring LinkedIn profiles. What my suggestion, I always do this and it's like I bring probably two top 10 profiles. I bring one that I think it's kind of a 80% match and I bring another one that is like 50, 30% match to that profile because you're going to get surprised how your criteria is probably aligned with the job description but not aligned with what your hiring manager is telling you. And then by bringing all these different profiles, you're going to get a more sense of what actually that hiring manager is looking for.

(15:32):

It's not only about bringing your top 10 super profiles that are perfectly aligned because you also need see from the ones that might not be aligned and you just compare all of them and you're going to see that during that conversation you're actually building with your hiring manager what the hiring manager is looking for because again, you are talking to a human that's new to your organization that probably has a lot of pressure on because he needs to, he or she or whatever needs to show that I'm capable of managing this team or whatever. And that hiring manager needs to see you as a partner instead of just kind of a service provider. So building that with your high margin and that conversation is going to help you to build that trust.

Shannon Ogborn (16:12):

Definitely. Do you have any examples of how this has played out in real life?

Maria Fernanda (16:18):

Yeah, I remember one, and I know that we talked about this, I was helping a completely new, let's say business unit. When I was working at Twilio, we were just hired, it was the first director of engineer for that business unit, so everything was just brand new. It was my third month at Twilio, so I wasn't the super expert on the organization either, so I had to do a lot of research and that's why I point out that it's very important to explain to the hiring manager why your process is established that way. And it's because I remember the hiring manager, so we had something that we called the Bar Raiser. So the Bar Raiser was someone that needed to be totally 100% outside of the team of the business unit. Let's say we were hiring for engineering for X, we needed to bring someone from marketing from like a totally different department and business unit because the idea of the Bar Raiser at that point was to make sure that all of our culture and our values were there in that candidate.

(17:20):

So it was really hard to make that hiring manager understand why we were bringing someone totally outside of the organization and team. And the Bar Raiser was very important in our recruitment process, even if the hiring manager said yes, but the Bar Raiser said no, it was a no for that candidate. He was really struggling on why was that. And I remember I had to have several sessions on a weekly basis making him understand why it was important. I remember I brought some business cases, I brought some business cases on what happened and the origin of why a Bar Raiser existed in our process. And at the end I remember it was very funny because at the end he was like, oh, I heard about this amazing Bar Raiser from marketing. Why don't we just invite that Bar Raiser through the process? So it's just about making them understand the why instead of just walking them through randomly through the process. I remember it was really hard because he was hiring the entire team and he was all by himself, so he was like the king of the place and I had to really work in that trust with that hiring man.

Shannon Ogborn (18:28):

Yeah, definitely. It's such a tough position because we're the recruiting experts, but they are the experts in their immediate field and so sometimes there's a little bit of a clash of like, well, which expertise should we go with on something? And usually the answer is somewhere in the middle. We can pull from both expertise and come in between. This is a little bit of a curve ball question, but I am curious if when you're working with managers who are new to the organization, they've built teams before, have you ever seen it come up as an issue that they just want to hire everyone they've worked with in the past instead of being open to profiles that recruiting sources or inbound applications, they kind of just want to build a team based off of all of the people they've had on their team before?

Maria Fernanda (19:16):

It hasn't happened to me actually because what has happened is they say, okay, I work with this leader. Let's say we're struggling on bringing a very specific niche type of profile to the organization and they are actually being really helpful on, okay, if we bring this leader, we might come with this network of type of this very specific type of profile. But I haven't seen me probably just my experience, I haven't seen that resistance on I'm going to hire my entire team from the other company because I think at the end they left the company happy. It's just that this is a new opportunity for them. It's just growth and development. It's not that they want to bring and make that hold on the other team where they work. So it's not like they want to bring everyone in. It is just that maybe there's a key leader that they want to bring on because they know that they have the expertise when there's a very niche type of referral. But it hasn't happened to me maybe for someone else.

Shannon Ogborn (20:15):

Good. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I think referrals and network from new to org hiring managers can be sort of an interesting thing that can become problematic if not monitored closely. But then there's also the coaching elements on the net new hiring manager. Walk me through some of what the challenges can be there and how you would go about coaching the net new hiring manager.

Maria Fernanda (20:43):

So just another thing I wanted to add for it works for, so I'm going to start from there. It's just sometimes you feel like your hiring manager is just being unresponsive. They don't care. Maybe you need to double check if they are related with your ATS or with the tools that you are using for recruitment because sometimes it's just that again, you are talking to a human, this is just one of their 100 tasks and being involved on learning a completely new system, it's just hard to do something that they're putting aside on their to-do list. And you need to make sure that they understand how they use it, simple things and how do are perfect on the ATS or how do I schedule an interview here or maybe I don't know how to integrate my calendar to the ATS yet, and you are just waiting there for the hiring manager to actually give you availability and it's just tooling as simple as that. Just make sure that your hiring manager understands how to use it. Take some time on your first conversation with hiring market to walk him through step number one because how you see a candidate, because this is all the information that you can see from my interview here and so on. Because sometimes it's just as simple as that. It's not alignment, it's not anything. It's just like, hey, this is the new tool. You need to learn how to use it.

Shannon Ogborn (21:59):

I worked historically in recruiting primarily with engineering hiring managers. And I think that a lot of times because you just know they're such smart, intelligent people who are building software that the software will be intuitive to them. But in reality it's still a new product, it's a new software. They're not typically experts in recruiting, so the flow may not make sense to them being able to coach them through it or better yet having assets to provide them so they can self-serve is so incredibly helpful because otherwise it could be blocking them, you don't even know it. So that's such a good point. Regardless of if the hiring manager is new to your org or net new.

Maria Fernanda (22:42):

Yeah, and it's funny, you probably assume that's part of their onboarding process because as a recruiter you are just onboarding a company. The first thing they onboard you is on your ATS on your systems. But again, hiring is just probably they're being trained on interviews or values or whatever, but they're not introduced. It's not part of their onboarding process to go through the ATS or the tools that you use for hiring. And it's something that I've realized with my experience, it's just not included. I don't know, it's just a skip. So take your time to do so because it's a simple task that might help you a lot. Yeah. Now talking about the hiring managers that has just been promoted first, and again, I think I'm going to point out this a lot during this conversation and is that you need to remind yourself that you are talking to human beings.

(23:33):

It's your hiring manager, you're working with that person, but you are talking with human beings that are as nervous as you because they have one task because they're assuming a new challenge, whatever. They're going through the same things as you are. And as a recruiter you are that consultant. You're not only a service provider just presenting candidates, you are their point of contact on hiring and the people team and you need to show that. I think that's very important. So the first thing is don't get frustrated because this is a completely new task for them and they have never done it before and they need to build a new different type of trust with their own team. And this first hire is probably the way that they're going to do it. Or let's say they are assuming these new hiring manager position because there's a new project going on and there's a lot of pressure.

(24:26):

That project goes well and this first hire for them, it's very, very important. So there's going to be a lot of probably control micromanagement, but just because there's a lot of pressure on them. So understand that and try to help as much as you can in that sense. And sometimes we're a little bit defensive as our recruiters. I don't know when they're making management or probably asking you a lot about the pipeline and what's going on, just understand what they're going through as well because it's going to help you to alleviate that pressure of what's going on and just being that partner for them. So manage expectations on that said and get prepared to get that probably kind of relationship because it's their first time and there's a lot of insecurity as well, so you're fine. And I remember this again, it was a net new hiring manager and he wanted eight interviews in the process. He really want to make sure that was the person he needed for the team. And I was like, I understand, but we can't have 12 interviews for one candidate and just walk them through that.

Shannon Ogborn (25:27):

Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of big part of it too is really being able to explain what your role is to the hiring manager. Can you walk me through a little bit about how you would have that conversation? Obviously different work to org because recruiters do kind of different capacities and different orgs.

Maria Fernanda (25:46):

And that exactly is very important. You need to explain them your role because probably in your organization, let's say there are sourcers, they are partners, they are coordinators and they are probably doing one hiring process. They're going to have three different people from the recruitment team to be involved in the process. And if you don't explain that to the hiring manager, he's going to get lost that he's going to be asking information to the coordinator, then probably to the sourcer going to he needs from you. So set up the base on what type of roles are going to be involved in the process from the recruitment team so that you can set up expectations on what actually he can get from you and what he can get from other people involved in the process. And that's really important. It's going to help you a lot with all the and everything.

(26:32):

And the other thing I think is really important when you're explaining your own role, you need to present yourself as a partner, not as someone, let me know how it goes or just let me know when we have someone on the pipeline, it's like you need to let them know that you are here to present constant feedback on constant data, what's going on in the market Because again, what we just mentioned at the beginning, you are in the front line, you're probably get it, you understand that, but your hiring manager, so you need to make sure that he sees you as someone that is constantly bringing something different into the conversation instead of we have 10 candidates on the screening. I think it's very important also understand what's going on on the team of that hiring manager because it's the first time again, ask business questions.

(27:22):

What's going on with this project? What's going on? Why are we creating this new product? What's going on in the market? Show some interest on what's going on because that is going to help you understand what's going on, but also guide your hiring manager probably what he needs because the first time he probably the hiring manager doesn't know what he needs. And that's something that you can actually help out with by understanding previous team, again, some internal research, understanding if they have lots of seniors, probably you need someone middle, someone junior to balance a little bit your team, those kind of things and those kinds of conversation. I think something that is really important for you to have because it's the first time they're having even that conversation about what's the structure of the team. They don't know how to structure a team. And I think it's very important also to sometimes bring your HRBP to the conversation because again, as a people team, you need to kind of be a consultant instead of just presenting candidates and that's it. And I think those things will help you to build that trust and make your hiring manager feel comfortable with you with the hiring process and trust in you. This super important decision for them more as an advisor than just a service provider again.

Shannon Ogborn (28:41):

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a couple of interesting things. One is that so many times when someone gets promoted, their first hire may actually be their backfill. So they're thinking like, okay, well I just need to basically hire me backfill. But it's like, is that what the team needs? But there's so many other considerations, like you said, around team structure that will really help a new hire manager hire for longevity of the team and long-term for the team than just sort of plopping somebody in there because that can be catastrophic as we've probably all seen. So yeah, all of this is making perfect sense. Overall, what do you think is really the most important things for recruiters to do to get their desired outcomes when working with and trying to influence hiring managers?

Maria Fernanda (29:33):

I think the first thing, and I've mentioned this before, is understanding the hiring manager as a human being. I'll give you an example. I remember one of my biggest challenge as a recruiter was when I was supporting VP of business operations. So if you think what does a business operation does in an organization, you need to think through that. What's the role of that person in this organization? And you think, okay, so this person was very detail oriented. Of course he needs to have everything in his mind. He organizes the goals of the organization. How are we going to do it? He brings up all the stakeholders, make them strategic decisions, he conducts that kind of conversation within the leaders of the organization. So when you understand the profile of your hiring manager, it's going to be easier for you to understand probably their communication channel.

(30:31):

How is the best way I can communicate with this hiring manager? So I remember I'm not a very detail oriented person. I need support. I know that my teammates know that I'm probably asking them to double check one of my emails or my reports and everything. I know that I'm not that way. And I remember this hiring manager was very detail oriented. That hiring manager that you were missing, I don't know a rec number, one of the numbers was wrong or he was like, I remember we talked to three candidates, white on the report says five, all those kind of details. And I remember I was very frustrated because he just point out very little things that we were like rocky mistakes for me, it was such a rocky mistake and I was so frustrated. I was talking to my manager at that point, one of the best managers I've ever had in my experience, and he was like, he walked me through that process.

(31:23):

So he make me think, what do you think this person does in the organization? I was like, okay, this, this. And he was like, he's very detailed-oriented and you need to communicate with him that way. So for example, let's make these changes to the report. Instead of just a presentation, let's share with him a sheet with everything very with categories. The data very differently presented. And when I understood that, I took away the pressure on myself as a recruiter and I was like, okay, it's just a different person. It is just a different type of relationship. Because I remember I was having a VP of product at the same time with this and with her the conversation was like, yeah, blah, blah. We were laughing. It was a conversation. Actually, the kick-off was a conversation. The report was a conversation because I mean she came from marketing and everything for her was a storytelling.

(32:18):

The kick-off was a storytelling very product side of the thing. So I had these two extreme, totally different type of hiring managers and I had to learn how to present the data to both of them, how to present a blocker and a solution to both of them because the communication was completely different. And I think one of your outcomes as a recruit is to first understand their way of communicating things. It's going to help you a lot and it's going to also take out of you that frustration. If the conversation is not going well, just kind of double check what's their role, and it's going to help you to understand that. So I think that's kind of the most important thing at the beginning, again, seeing them as a human being. I think the other very important is, and sometimes we miss that because sometimes we couldn't get very operational.

(33:11):

There's a lot of tasks, things you need to do, repetitive tasks and so on that you forget that you have weekly meetings with your hiring manager for a reason. If it was just updates, you can send an email Slack and that's it, right? But if you have weekly meetings with your hiring manager, and even more important, if they are net neutral, your organization and they have just been promoted, I think I suggest you to have those weekly meetings. You are going to have different conversations on each of them, and if you don't have a goal to the meeting, skip it. Save time for everyone, save time for you, save time for your hiring manager.

(33:47):

But think about a goal for that meeting. It's not only about how the pipeline is going is hey, there's been this change in the business that probably might impact this role and we need to shift to X to Y, or hey, the market has whatever, or those kind of conversations and having a goal is going to help you to influence but also guide the conversation differently instead of just presenting data. But you need to get to that meeting with, okay, my goal from this meeting is to get this result. Don't enter to your weekly meeting. Like, hey, yeah, this is what's going on, and that's it, because otherwise they're not going to see the value of it. That's when I think hiring managers start seeing recruitment processes or meetings or wherever as a waste of time. They don't see any outcomes from it.

Shannon Ogborn (34:38):

Indicating value and making sure you're continuously showing value is such a big part of your success because it does really build that trust. Before we get our questions that we like to ask everyone, any sort of last bits to add on this?

Maria Fernanda (34:54):

No, I think that weekly meeting, make sure you have your goal and also try to make them use that time wisely. I think it's kind of the key of it. And yeah, just again, they're human beings. The only thing I want to add.

Shannon Ogborn (35:09):

Amazing. Well, taking a big step back, we were very deep into the hiring manager topic. We at Ashby talk a lot about hiring excellence, and I would love to hear when you hear hiring excellence, what does that mean to you?

Maria Fernanda (35:24):

With my team, I have this funny sentence that I always even mention to my leaders because for me, hiring excellence is providing your team with the right tools to be successful. And me the right tools are those that can give you the right data to actually influence decisions. So providing the right tools to your team, I think that's hiring. For me, hiring excellence is data baseline, and then you need the right tools to get that data, to have hiring excellence to make the right decisions.

Shannon Ogborn (35:55):

Yeah, definitely continuous improvement, especially as we talked about at the top of the episode, is so important because of the evolving market. It's never going to stop evolving, and so unless you're evolving with it, you're going to be quite behind, so love that. Okay, my final question, my favorite question, what is your recruiting hot take?

Maria Fernanda (36:19):

I think it's very related with what we've talked today, and it is like recruitment for me, it's more about alignment than actually finding talent. That's it. It's not about finding the right candidate, it's how you align the team. That's recruitment for me.

Shannon Ogborn (36:34):

Period. Amazing. I love that. I love a nice concise hot take. It's just all encompassed in one sentence. Perfect. I think we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you or connect with you?

Maria Fernanda (36:50):

You can connect with me with LinkedIn, of course, is our tool. Maria Fernanda Oyaga, happy to connect with you guys, help you in everything you need, and also create this amazing network that this podcast has bring to the recruitment community. I love it. So thank you, Shannon.

Shannon Ogborn (37:04):

Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining us on this episode. I think people will get tremendous value out of hearing how you have historically worked with hiring managers to get them aligned. I really appreciate you spending time with us, so thank you for coming, and thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time.

(37:23):

This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be: a scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS, scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.