If you were a child of the late 90s like yours truly, there’s a good chance you owned a “___ is Life. The Rest is Just Details” T-shirt.

Mine was baseball. It was off-white by the end of its tenure, soft to the touch from hundreds of washings and hung to my knees fulfilling the unwritten rule that under no circumstance should a parent buy a shirt that actually fits his or her child.

I thought about this T-shirt the other week. I was in Denver listening to John Vlastelica—Founder and Managing Editor of Recruiting Toolbox—speak to a room of recruiters and staffing professionals when he said something that caught my attention.

“Hiring managers care about two things,” he said. “Speed and quality.”

Speed and quality. That’s it. They don’t care how you get there or how many other companies you recruit for or what job board(s) you use. They want positions filled quickly and with the best candidates.

The rest is just…details.

But let’s get real. These “details” are everything to recruiters. These details are where recruiters find, screen, interview and hire candidates. These details are where the “recruiting magic” happens.

So how can we make hiring managers care about the process without realizing it? Easy. Make them part of the process every step of the way with a simple and powerful cloud software solution.

1. Keep your hiring managers in the loop

Whether we are talking about the candidate experience or the hiring manager experience, sooner or later we’ll always come back to communication. If you want a good hiring manager experience, you must talk with your hiring managers and make them a part of the recruiting process.

Zoho Recruit makes this easy thanks to workflow rules and automatic email alerts. Create one, or multiple, workflow rules for various milestones you reach during the recruiting process and associate an email template to it. These emails will automatically be sent to your hiring managers whenever you associate a candidate to a job opening, schedule an interview or invite the hiring manager to the interview.

2. Convince with data

Telling your hiring manager you’ve been “hard at work” going through every active and passive candidate in your pipeline isn’t always enough. You have to show them with data, especially when big data and analytics have become ubiquitous with the recruiting industry.

Zoho Recruit gives recruiters the ability to create automated, client-specific reports to keep hiring managers informed about the state of all job openings. Use pre-packaged reports or create custom ones and share them with your hiring managers so they are never again in the dark about a hire.

Automate this process by setting email schedules to send reports daily, weekly or monthly.

3. Make the hiring manager the interviewer

Since we’ve already established that the more involved and informed a hiring manager is in the process the better the relationship, let’s take it one step further. Sometimes a superb hiring manager experience means bringing in the hiring manager in for the interview—especially for candidates they’ve approved and are excited about meeting face-to-face.

Zoho Recruit makes this easy by letting recruiters give hiring managers access to only the “Interviews” portal of your database. Once you schedule an interview and associate it to the interviewer (hiring manager), he or she will receive a notification and the interview will be automatically added to his or her calendar.

When the interview is over, give the hiring manager access to the interview assessment report via a link so he or she can add feedback about the candidate and interview. Create a workflow rule and have the link emailed to your hiring manager automatically when the interview is finished. 

4. Support simple collaboration

Sharing documents and folders with your hiring managers shouldn’t be a complicated process, and shouldn’t require you to jump from window to window on your laptop or mobile device.

Create documents or spreadsheets and share them with your clients all within your Zoho Recruit database. This lets you share job opening details, candidate lists, resumes and anything else for easy collaboration.

5. Deliver clean formatted and branded resumes

Put yourself in a hiring manager’s position for a second. Recruiting is only a fraction of their workday and dealing with you is only a fraction of that fraction. If they are receiving multiple resumes a week—or even a day—they better be neat, clean and clearly marked with your name or company name.

The formatted/branded resume feature in Zoho Recruit lets you create a template with your company watermark or logo ​on the resume while also letting you choose to remove specific details like email address, telephone number and address.

Delivering quality candidates in the least amount of days may be the end goal, but the best candidates are born from the details. Additionally, great hiring manager experiences come not just from details but framing the details in the right way.

By using Zoho Recruit, you not only keep hiring managers informed but also make them care about the details without realizing it. ​Put the details in the hands of a powerful applicant tracking system and deliver exactly what hiring mangers want. Every time.