Hiring manager

What the hiring manager owns

Six things, in this order:

• The case for the role: why does it exist, what does success look like.
• The criteria: must-haves, nice-to-haves, the hiring bar.
• The interview plan: who interviews what, in which order.
• The decision: final yes/no on the offer.
• The negotiation: pushing on salary band if the candidate is exceptional.
• The onboarding: the first 90 days after the new hire starts.

A recruiter who tries to take any of these from a hiring manager produces friction. A hiring manager who tries to push all of these onto a recruiter produces bad hires.

The relationship with the recruiter

The clean division of labor in an SMB:

• Recruiter owns the funnel — sourcing, scheduling, candidate experience, paperwork.
• Hiring manager owns the role — criteria, decisions, fit assessment, post-hire success.

The kickoff meeting (where the hiring plan gets written) is when this division is set. Without that meeting, the recruiter ends up guessing at criteria and the hiring manager ends up frustrated with the candidates they’re seeing.

Common SMB failure mode

In small teams, the founder is the hiring manager for every senior role. That works until it doesn’t. When the founder’s calendar can’t sustain the interview load, hires either slow down or quality drops. The fix is delegating final-round interviews to peer-level interviewers and reserving the founder for offer conversations.

Where Join fits

Hiring managers in Join see one view: their candidates, their scorecards, their decisions. The recruiter sees the full process. Same data, different lenses. See the features page.