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Growth by Design Talent's Newsletter · Jun 25, 2025

Why your hiring managers are losing top candidates (and how to fix it)

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Growth by Design Talent · Growth by Design Talent's Newsletter

To our Talent Community,

While AI tools are quickly transforming recruitment, you can't use AI for everything—and top talent remains motivated by not only what they’ll work on but who they'll work with, and for. The hiring manager is one of the most important people in the interview process, with 51% of companies saying that hiring managers have the greatest impact on the quality of a hire.

The adage is true for a reason — ”people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” For candidates, hiring managers are more than a future supervisor—they’re also the people translating the realities of the role, team, and company. Yet many hiring managers at growth-stage companies might struggle with sharing this information and closing candidates. These hiring managers often fall into one of two categories:

Either first-time managers who are learning to hire on the fly after being rising stars as individual contributors, or experienced managers who relied previously on strong employer brands and don't know how to sell effectively without the well-oiled machine of a talent function that many large companies have.

So, how do you help your hiring managers close candidates? Better yet, can they get so good at the close that they're able to coach their hiring teams to be more effective too? For now, only humans can read emotional cues, build genuine rapport, and uncover the complex motivations that drive career decisions. As companies automate wherever possible in the hiring process, that should free up more resources to do what only humans can do best—connect with other people.

The gap between what hiring managers need to do and what they're actually equipped to do is where training becomes critical. Whether that happens through one-on-one mentorship with a dedicated talent leader or at a company-wide training, these skills aren't intuitive for all managers. At GBD, we've trained thousands of leaders across more than 100 companies to be more effective at hiring using our comprehensive three-part closing framework: understanding the candidate, inspiring the candidate, and explaining the right information.

We always start with understanding the candidate and their extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. What’s driving them to want to make a change in their career? Who—or what—is influencing their decision-making process? What are their push factors, their pull factors, and what is their decision ultimately going to come down to if they have multiple offers? If you don’t learn this from the beginning (and keep learning about it as the candidate shifts their thinking throughout the process), everything else you do will be less effective.

To get at this information, ask powerful, open-ended questions. Reflect back what you hear from the candidate, checking for comprehension along the way. Get curious about what’s not working in their current role, what a great culture or team fit means to them, and how they’d value different parts of the offer package. Then, throughout the interview process, make sure you’re connecting the information you’ve learned about the candidate to the stories and information you share about the company. Candidates need to feel both inspired and understood.

We know many companies may not have extensive training budgets this quarter, so we wanted to share one critical piece of our framework that you can implement immediately. Inspiring candidates is often the make-or-break moment where skills assessment meets human connection—it's where candidates move from “this company seems interesting” to “I need to work here.”

If you want to learn our complete methodology and get hands-on training support, we’re always here to help.

When candidates hear “fast-paced environment” or “innovative disrupter" from five different companies in one week, these phrases lose their meaning. But research shows that sharing stories, instead of buzzwords, activates multiple areas of the brain simultaneously—not just the language processing centers, but also the areas that would be engaged if listeners were actually experiencing the events themselves.

This is why a candidate will forget that you mentioned “collaborative culture” but will remember the story about how your engineering team stayed late to help marketing hit a product launch deadline, then celebrated together with pizza and ice cream at midnight. Stories create emotional resonance and help candidates visualize themselves as part of your team.

And at its most important, the goal of telling a compelling and personal story is to speak to what’s important to the candidate. By understanding intrinsic and extrinsic motivators—such as working for a mission-driven company, joining a team with great mentorship, or a clear growth trajectory for their career over the next few years—and shaping your stories, examples, and questions to speak to those motivators, you’ll be able to close candidates more effectively.

So, what makes those stories memorable and emotionally resonant?

  • They’re relevant to the candidate’s motivations

  • They’re specific to the company

  • They genuinely matter to the hiring manager or interviewer sharing them

For instance, don't only tell them your CEO really values transparency. Talk about the last all-hands meeting, where she walked the whole company through the executive team's goals for the quarter and shared her plan for every exec to hold themselves accountable to those goals. Don't just say your team has a “one-team-one-goal” mentality—share about the Slack thread where your entire team celebrated one person’s major launch together with dolphin-themed gifs (in honor of their favorite animal).

The most effective hiring managers don't wing it in the interview—they come prepared with a curated collection of stories that showcase different aspects of their company culture and values so they can better “sell” their company in a genuine, authentic way. If you’re a recruiter, work with your hiring managers, who can then train their teammates to craft stories that will inspire candidates.

To get you thinking, start with your company values. For each core value, see if you can identify how that value showed up in action. Look for recent examples that feel authentic and relatable.

Cover different scenarios. Include stories about how your team handles challenges, celebrates wins, supports each other, and makes decisions. This gives you flexibility to match the story to a candidate’s motivators.

Make it personal. The best stories are ones that show who you are as a manager and a leader, which may touch on your values, passions, and why you show up to work every day. All the better if these stories are ones you were personally involved in or witnessed firsthand!

Keep them concise. A few bullet points with a clear beginning, middle, and end will take you far.

Here are some prompts to get you started with your hiring managers:

  • Describe a time in the last year when our team rallied together to solve a problem. What happened, and what did that show you about our culture?

  • What's a recent decision our leadership made that you were proud to be part of this company? Why did it matter to you?

  • Tell me about a colleague who embodies our company values. What specific behavior or action demonstrated that?

  • What's something that happened here that would never happen at your previous company? What does that say about how we work?

  • What initially drew you to want to work at this company? What’s one thing that keeps you wanting to work here?

Timing is everything when it comes to sharing these stories. A candidate might ask “tell me about your team culture” in a first interview but ask a more pointed question right before they get an offer. Have a variety of stories ready to share at different points in the process, such as:

  • Early in the hiring manager screen: Share at least one story that connects to what the candidate said motivates them

  • During team interviews: Have each interviewer prepared with one relevant story that is most authentic to them and their time at the company

  • In the final interview: Use stories to address any lingering concerns or hesitations you detect in the candidate

  • During the offer conversation: Reinforce key selling points with stories that match their priorities and motivators

We recommend creating a shared document of these stories for easy access during interviews. Consider integrating this story practice into monthly or quarterly team meetings, to keep these ideas top of mind and remind folks to be on the lookout for inspiring moments. Recruiters can also keep their own doc where they collect these key moments for the teams they support, so that they’re ready with concrete examples for any candidate question or concern.

Most hiring managers aren't naturally skilled at knowing how to close top talent, but they can learn. Inspiring candidates through authentic storytelling is just one critical piece of effective closing—but it’s often the piece that transforms an evaluation conversation into a moment of human connection.

While AI streamlines your recruiting processes, companies whose people excel at uniquely human skills will consistently secure the best candidates and stand out in a crowded market. Closing is a skill that any hiring manager can develop with the right mentorship and training.

As always, reach out if you want to talk more about this, or dig into the rest of our framework for closing top talent.

—

Mike, Adam & Jill, & special thanks to Janet Frishberg for her contributions to this month’s newsletter

Why This Matters: In today's competitive talent landscape, recruiters who can transition from being tactical contributors to strategic advisors significantly increase their impact on hiring outcomes and business results. This skill gap was identified as the #1 training need across our community.

You'll Learn How To:

  • Build domain expertise to guide and influence hiring decisions

  • Use data to back recommendations effectively

  • Communicate effectively with different stakeholder types

  • Frame recommendations and tradeoffs strategically to drive better decisions

Who Should Attend: Anyone in talent looking to enhance their strategic impact and improve stakeholder relationships

Format: Both sessions are virtual with practical frameworks, breakout activities, and relevant recruiting case studies

Dates:

  • Day 1: July 8: 9-11am PT

    • In this session we will teach you the skills and frameworks for becoming a trusted advisor

  • Day 2: July 15: 9-10:30am PT

    • After having a week to put your new trusted advisor skills into action, we’ll reconvene to answer questions, problem solve your specific use-cases, and put some of the frameworks to use in your day-to-day work.

Investment: $950 per participant (20% discount for teams of 3+). Register here!

Did we miss your career change? Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com

📚 Playbooks:

  • Your Guide to Evaluating and Selecting an ATS: A guide with helpful process frameworks, and evaluation templates to help you make an informed decision about selecting the ATS that is the best fit for your company.

  • Navigating an IPO: A guide to help you navigate your team through the IPO process. It includes tools and tactics to prepare your team, proactively communicate to pending candidates, and evolve your recruiting operations to support the shift in business.

Photo credit for preview image: Mina Rad on Unsplash

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