Are we asking too much of hiring managers?
TL;DR
Employees still trust their direct managers more than senior leadership, but that trust is under pressure. At the same time, many managers are expected to interview, assess and onboard new hires alongside running their teams. For organizations with high-volume or frontline hiring needs, protecting manager capacity isn’t simply an employee experience issue. It can affect candidate experience, hiring quality and whether managers have enough time for the moments where their judgment and credibility matter most.
Trust in senior leadership is in freefall. Half of UK employees no longer trust their CEO, a nine-point drop in a single year. In the US, Gallup puts trust in organizational leadership at just 21%. Ask people how they feel about the people running their company, and the honest answer, increasingly, is: not much.
Ask them about their manager, and the story changes. Roughly three in four employees still say they trust the person they report to directly. Fewer than six in ten extend that trust to the leadership team. Barely half extend it to the CEO. The further trust has to travel from someone’s actual, daily experience, the thinner it gets.
That’s the reassuring version of this data. It’s also getting harder to believe.
The layer that was supposed to hold
DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast found that trust in immediate managers fell from 46% to 29% in just two years.
Gallup’s research has long shown how much influence managers have over team engagement. This leaves organizations in a difficult position: the layer everyone is counting on to absorb the uncertainty coming from above is also showing signs of strain.
Two things can be true at once.
Managers can still be among the most trusted people employees encounter at work.
And that trust can be getting harder to sustain.
It would be easy to read this as a leadership development problem. Train managers better and perhaps the numbers will recover.
But what if managers have suddenly evolved to be worse at managing?
What if we’re simply asking more of the relationship than it was ever designed to carry?
Nobody trained them for either job
This is where a leadership problem becomes a hiring problem.
In many organizations, the same manager absorbing uncertainty from above is also conducting interviews, deciding who joins the team and helping new hires settle in.
Often, they’re doing it with little more than a process, a template and a login.
AMS’s work with frontline and store-level hiring has encountered this problem directly. Managers can find themselves acting as recruiters, schedulers and onboarding specialists alongside the job they were actually hired to do.
And each additional responsibility looks perfectly reasonable on its own.
Review these candidates.
Find thirty minutes for an interview.
Submit feedback.
Approve the offer.
Check whether the new hire has completed everything.
Make sure they turn up on Monday.
None sounds particularly difficult.
Stack them on top of running a team, meeting targets, managing performance, handling absences, answering questions and dealing with whatever went wrong that morning, and the picture changes.
Something eventually gets rushed.
An interview becomes another meeting to get through. Feedback gets written from memory hours later. The safest candidate wins because there wasn’t enough time to investigate the interesting one.
The consequences rarely appear on a manager-capacity dashboard.
They appear months later as a hiring decision that didn’t work out.
And there is another reason this matters.
The manager conducting the interview is often the first person a candidate imagines actually working for.
Their credibility shapes whether the candidate believes what they’re being told about the role. Their attention shapes whether the interview feels like a genuine conversation or an administrative step. Their behavior after the offer starts teaching the new hire what working there will really be like.
We ask managers to create trust before someone joins the organization while asking them to preserve it among the people already there.
That’s a lot to place on one relationship.
The layer nobody budgets for
Manager capacity rarely appears in a hiring forecast.
We count requisitions. Recruiter capacity. Applications. Interviews. Time to hire. Cost per hire.
But somewhere inside those numbers are hours borrowed from people whose primary job is something else.
One vacancy might barely register.
Multiply it across stores, branches, contact centers, warehouses or other distributed workforces, and the hiring model can depend on thousands of small withdrawals from manager capacity.
At the same time, those managers are being asked to carry something considerably harder to measure.
Trust.
No new value statement from the executive team can manufacture that relationship.
It gets built much closer to the work: when someone gets an honest answer, when a difficult conversation is handled properly, when a promise made during an interview turns out to be true six months later.
One interaction at a time.
The organizations paying attention to this won’t necessarily be the ones with the most inspiring leadership messaging.
They’ll be the ones that recognize manager capacity for what it has become: a finite business resource.
Especially when those managers are also hiring.
Because if the manager really is the last person employees still trust, there is a limit to how much more organizations can ask that relationship to carry.
What could your managers do with more time to manage?
Explore how AMS High Volume RPO removes recruitment friction at scale while keeping managers involved in the hiring moments where their judgment matters most.
FAQs
Why is the hiring manager experience important?
Hiring managers influence several moments that shape a candidate’s view of an organization, from the interview and hiring decision to onboarding and the reality of the role after joining. When managers are stretched across recruitment administration and their day-to-day responsibilities, they have less capacity for the conversations and decisions where their judgment matters most.
How can hiring managers affect candidate experience?
For many candidates, the hiring manager is the person who makes the role feel real. How prepared they are for the interview, how honestly they describe the work, how quickly they provide feedback and whether the experience matches what was promised can all shape a candidate’s decision to join and their early impression of the organization.
How can high-volume hiring affect manager capacity?
In high-volume environments, managers may be involved in screening, interview scheduling, candidate assessment, feedback, offers and onboarding while still being responsible for day-to-day operations. Repeated across large numbers of vacancies, those tasks can consume significant manager capacity.
How can recruitment technology support hiring managers?
About AMS
AMS powers talent strategies that deliver results, redefining a new era of talent driven by people, process, data and technology.
Transform your hiring
AMS offers digital innovation and responsible AI, providing agile talent acquisition solutions and talent consulting services that can scale with your business.
