Author: Joonatan Hongell
The same hiring manager who pushes back on your TA best practices during a job intake meeting is perfectly friendly over coffee. You've seen this. The friction tracks the context, not the person.
Most TA teams treat hiring manager friction as a relationship problem. The recruiter needs more trust, better influencing skills, a stronger relationship with the hiring manager. If the relationship were stronger, the hiring manager would listen. More credibility, and the recruiter could push back effectively. That logic puts the problem between two people. The solution is a stakeholder management workshop.
This is fixing the wrong thing.
In the book The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken draws on an idea from Jane Jacobs that stuck with me. Jacobs mapped two different operating logics that run through all organized activity. She called them guardian and commercial syndromes. Guardian logic protects, documents, and maintains standards. Commercial logic moves, delivers, and gets to the outcome. When they meet in a single interaction, one will dominate. Which one wins depends on the incentive structure, not on intentions.
Hiring managers live in commercial mode. An open role is an obstacle to delivery. Every week without a hire means overloaded teams and slipped deadlines. When a hiring manager says "I already know who I want, just process them through," that's commercial logic working as designed. Minimize friction. Get to the outcome.
TA exists to inject guardian logic into that same conversation. Document the decision rationale. Apply assessment criteria consistently. Protect the organization from a bad hire. When a recruiter pushes to interview the full shortlist or insists on a structured scorecard, that's guardian logic, also working as designed.
The hiring manager sees someone adding unnecessary process. The recruiter sees someone ignoring TA best practice. The collision is between two legitimate operating systems running in the same conversation, and both sides are acting rationally within their own logic.
I've seen this play out at the end of a search. After the second-round interviews, the hiring manager didn't want to spend time giving feedback to the candidates who didn't make it through. Moving toward the hire is commercial logic working exactly as it should. I pushed back. Rejected candidates had invested time and deserved a clear outcome. That's guardian logic. The hiring manager eventually understood, but there was real friction before we got there, and it had nothing to do with our relationship.
And every time a shortcut works out, the commercial case gets stronger. A hire who succeeds despite skipping the structured interview makes the next guardian intervention harder to justify, even though the success may have been luck, not proof.
TA functions often measure hiring manager satisfaction as a performance metric. Think about what that actually measures when the friction is between systems, not between people. A recruiter who holds to guardian standards will generate more friction than one who defaults to commercial mode and pleases the hiring manager. The metric rewards giving in. The smoothest hiring manager relationships in your TA function might belong to the recruiter who has quietly abandoned some of the guardian standards the organization hired them to protect.
When a system generates a problem, you can redesign the system or add a filter at the output end. The filter treats the symptom while the root cause keeps running. The more you invest in the filter, the more legitimate the underlying process looks, because something is clearly being done about it.
The stakeholder management workshop is the filter. It targets the friction while preserving the process that generates it. Two incompatible operating systems still negotiate every interaction from scratch. A recruiter who sits through the workshop might handle the next disagreement more smoothly. The structural collision that produced the disagreement hasn't changed.
The alternative is process design that keeps the syndromes from colliding in the first place.
Before a search starts, the recruiter and hiring manager agree on which decisions belong to each system. The recruiter owns the job ad, the process design, and the candidate experience. The hiring manager owns who proceeds, who's rejected, and who sits on the panel. When both sides know which rules apply where, neither has to persuade the other in the moment.
If the scorecard requires written evidence before a hire/no-hire decision, the structure does the guardian work. The form already asks. The guardian standard moves from a personal request into a system requirement, which means it stops feeling like the recruiter getting in the way.
When the syndromes do collide in real time, and they will, try this question: "If we skip the structured interview and this hire doesn't work out in six months, will we know why?" It works because it's a commercial question. It invites the hiring manager to use their own logic on the guardian problem.
Relationship quality matters. A recruiter who doesn't deliver on commitments will generate friction that no process fixes. But when the same pattern repeats across hiring managers and across recruiters, the explanation is structural.
Even in an established relationship where the collision has been happening for months, naming the dynamic changes the conversation. "We keep getting stuck at the same point in every search. I think we're each optimizing for different things, and we haven't agreed on which rules apply where." It's a structural observation, not a stakeholder management technique, and many hiring managers will recognize it.
And if the fix your organization keeps reaching for is more training, the question worth asking is whether anyone is redesigning the system or just adding another filter at the end of the pipe.
Models in this article
Guardian vs. Commercial Moral Syndromes — Societies run on two incompatible moral systems. Mixing them in one role or interaction corrupts both, because each system's virtues become vices in the other's context.
Discipline: Political philosophy / moral theory
Source: Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival (1992), via Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (1993)
End-of-Pipe Fallacy — Treating problems at the output end of a system creates an illusion of progress while the system keeps generating the same problems.
Discipline: Ecological economics / systems thinking
Source: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (1993)
The Recruiting Lattice takes mental models from fields like behavioral science, sociology, and decision theory and turns them into practical tools for talent acquisition.