Hiring manager engagement is one of the most consistently cited challenges in talent acquisition - and one of the least directly addressed. In-house recruitment teams invest heavily in building strong candidate communication frameworks, employer brand narratives, and structured processes. Then a hiring manager goes off-script, takes three weeks to give feedback, or makes a candidate feel unwelcome in a first interview.
The carefully constructed experience unravels.
What 100 talent acquisition leaders told us
In April 2026, Jobtrain facilitated five independent hackathon sessions at the Talent Labs Collaborate London event, bringing together approximately 100 talent acquisition leaders from across UK sectors and industries. Each group was asked to identify their biggest candidate experience pain points - without any prompting or cross-contamination of ideas between groups.
Four out of five groups independently raised hiring manager engagement and accountability as a critical gap.
That's not a coincidence. When five groups of TA professionals, working completely separately, converge on the same issue, it tells you something important: this is not a niche frustration. It's a sector-wide challenge that most organisations haven't yet solved.
The specific issues groups identified included a lack of ownership and buy-in from hiring managers throughout the recruitment lifecycle, slow decision-making that directly caused candidate drop-off, inconsistent standards between managers within the same organisation, and a consistent failure to complete feedback forms within the ATS. Some groups noted that managers were actively putting candidates off - at interview, during introductions, or simply through their absence from the process.
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Why this keeps happening
The root cause isn't bad managers. It's misaligned accountability. In most organisations, hiring managers carry responsibility for filling a role but face little consequence for how the process feels to candidates along the way. Recruiters own candidate experience in name, but lack the authority to enforce it across all the moments that matter.
The result is a split experience. Candidates move through a professionally managed application stage, then hit a wall when they reach the human beings who will actually decide whether to hire them.
Add to this the time pressure that most hiring managers operate under, and the result is predictable: decisions get delayed, feedback gets deprioritised, and candidates (who are often in active conversations with other employers) move on.
What the research says works
The hackathon groups weren't just identifying problems. They were generating practical solutions, and several approaches came up repeatedly across sessions.
The single most impactful recommendation was establishing an upfront contract with every hiring manager before a role goes live. Not a casual conversation - a documented agreement covering their ownership of the process, the expected timeline for feedback at each stage, and the standards they're committing to uphold. When expectations are set in writing and agreed before the vacancy opens, accountability follows naturally.
Groups also recommended making the business case tangible for managers. Abstract appeals to candidate experience rarely land. Data does. When managers can see that slow feedback correlates directly with offer declines and increased time-to-hire, the conversation shifts from a values discussion to an operational one.
Other practical solutions included mandating hiring manager training as a prerequisite for being given authority to recruit, creating a cohort of exemplary 'super interviewers' whose approach becomes the visible gold standard for others, and using the ATS to track feedback submission rates so that persistently slow responders can be identified and supported.
The ATS piece
One finding from the research that deserves attention is how many of these challenges are addressable through technology that most organisations already have. Properly configured, an ATS can prompt hiring managers to submit feedback immediately after an interview, send automated reminders when deadlines are approaching, and give recruiters visibility of where bottlenecks are forming.
The problem, as the research makes clear, isn't usually the absence of tools. It's the absence of configuration and accountability frameworks around them.
Where to start
If hiring manager engagement is a recognised pain point in your organisation, the most useful first step isn't a training programme or a new process document. It's downloading our candidate experiencce whitepaper! From there you can map the candidate journey from application through to offer, and identify every moment where a hiring manager's action (or inaction) is the deciding variable.
Then start there.