By John Vlastelica

What do the best HR pros do differently?
As a consultant and trainer, I’ve led focus group meetings with thousands of people managers, recruiters, HR generalists, and candidates over the past 10 years, with clients that range from Nike to Groupon, Nestle to Eddie Bauer.  And I regularly dig into the expectations that our people managers have of us as recruiters and HR generalists.  Good news – most business leaders don’t want just transactional support from their partners in HR.  They want us to step up and lead.

While there are many things great HR professionals do well, I wanted to share two in particular that the best do best.

1. They are great at diagnosing performance issues with people-managers/hiring managers.

Many of us are great at coaching managers to work with their employees on performance issues.  But one of the opportunity areas I see, is to get much better at diagnosing performance issues with our internal clients, the managers we support. 

Generally, when a manager isn’t performing well in his duties as a people manager or hiring manager it’s because of one or more of these four root issues. 

• Lacks skill. We can solve this with training, mentoring, how-to guides, and direct feedback and coaching.
• Lacks will. We can solve this by rewarding good behaviors, performance feedback, role expectation clarification and top-down prioritization.
• Lacks time. This one is the most commonly stated – “I’m too busy to do that”.  The reality is that if it’s a priority they’ll make the time, so the solution for this one is often to address it like it’s a will issue.  Additionally, if the manager isn’t in any pain – for example, they don’t have urgency around making a hire  – they’re unlikely to make time for it.  So we need to be smart about identifying and leveraging pain points to motivate managers to make time.
• Lacks tools. I think HR pros are required by law to love forms (smile).  Often, managers have the skill, the will, and will invest the time, but we put these awful forms in front of them…the tools we give them to “help” actually prevent them from doing the work.  One of my clients in Canada had a 13-page swim-lane flowchart that they expected managers to read to follow an HR process.  And then they had to fill out a three-page interview guide before any offers would go out.

2. They are skilled at leveraging service level agreement (SLA) conversations and setting and managing expectations around roles and timelines.

I’m not a fan of using written SLA documents with our managers, but I see many of the best HR pros leverage really clear, well-communicated role and timeline expectations when working with the managers they support.  They are upfront about what the manager’s role is, and just as importantly, the consequences to them, personally, if they don’t fulfill their responsibility.  I’m not talking about threatening them.  I’m talking about honest conversations about what happens to their high performers if they’re not given opportunities to grow and learn on the job, and what happens to top candidates if they aren’t followed up with a few days after interviewing. 

Confronting a manager when he’s displaying bad behaviors can be, well, a little scary.  The key to avoiding a scary confrontation is to talk about potential consequences up front, in a matter-of-fact way, tied to consequences that matter to them.  When we talk about consequences up front, we show them the key role they play in a successful outcome.

I often phrase it like this: “Our most successful hiring managers are able to turn around feedback on interviewed candidates within 24 hours.  Those managers that struggle – those with openings that stay open well beyond our average time-to-fill of 45 days – typically sit on candidate feedback for days or weeks.  We usually lose that candidate and have to start the search over, leaving the hiring manager under-resourced and his team over-worked.”  I would not want to phrase it like this: “I need you to complete this interviewing form – all three pages – so that we can close out the candidate file within 24 hours and comply with our HR process.” Phrase it so that it speaks to what they care about.

The best HR pros I’ve worked with in my career are direct communicators, with a focus that goes beyond transactional excellence.  They bring a “help me help you” approach that includes diagnosing manager performance issues and being clear about roles and consequences.  They are genuinely invested in helping people managers succeed as people managers.

John Vlastelica is speaking at the 2014 HRMA Conference + Tradeshow. His session, Lead or Be Led: What the Best HR Pros Do Differently, is on Wednesday, April 16, 2014. For more information, please visit bchrma.org/conf2014.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader (Amazon, Expedia) turned consultant and trainer.  His firm, Recruiting Toolbox, helps companies improve their recruiting strategies and processes, and trains recruiters and hiring managers in best practices.  Clients include Google, Nike, World Bank, Yahoo!, Talisman, and Hitachi.  Learn more at www.recruitingtoolbox.com and find John at twitter.com/Vlastelica.