The Magic Question
Understanding Candidate Motivators
What do you not have today that you want in your next role? This magic question is the secret to understanding a candidate’s key motivator and building a personalized interview experience.
To a large extent, traditional recruiting models are broken and impersonal. A rapidly scaling company will speak with hundreds of candidates and spend thousands of hours interviewing. Recruiters and hiring teams know they have to talk with X number of candidates per hire and it’s easy to see individual people as merely a pipeline metric. Chances are, everyone reading this has had a nightmare interview where a group of disinterested strangers puts them through a gauntlet of irrelevant trivia questions, all while providing little insight into the company or role.
Why should you care? A poor candidate experience hurts your recruiting brand, negatively impacts offer acceptance rates, wastes valuable interview time, and, most importantly, is a crappy way to treat other humans.
Fear not, there is a simple way to improve your ability to hire top talent; understand what motivates them, then build a personalized interview process.
In my experience, candidates have one non-negotiable criteria they will use to pick their next role. While there are many factors that play into a decision, this is the thing they can’t live without. Your goal, from the first conversation, is to understand and address that key decision driver.
Below are the 4 primary candidate motivators:
- Mission/Market: Why does your company matter, what is the impact, and how big is the opportunity?
- Team: Who will they work with, what will they learn, and what is the potential career path?
- Product: What are you building/doing, what cool things will they do, and what is the long-term vision?
- Upside: What is the potential financial gain, what are the benefits, and are there any unique perks?
Human nature causes us to project our own interest onto those around us. The best companies take the time to understand the goals and aspirations of their future team members. If your company can meet them, become experts at explaining how. If not, don’t be afraid to part ways and save everyone time.
As an example, Upside as a primary motivator is a red flag in startup land. Someone will always beat your cash offer, give more equity, or add a higher sign-on bonus. These candidates are not only unlikely to accept your offer, they are flight risks if they join.
For early stage companies, a candidate focused on Team could be a great fit. Maybe they have a poor leadership team and are searching for a mentor. If you have a leader with demonstrated experience mentoring world class teams, you will have a unique selling opportunity.
Everyone on your recruiting and interview teams should be able to clearly describe how your company is best in class in each of these 4 areas. Don’t assume interviewers know what to say, create a cheat sheet and train them. In a recent training Lightspeed hosted for recruiting and HR leaders, we outlined examples of an “interviewer script”.
If you don’t currently have an interview script, organize a brainstorming session with people from multiple departments. Discuss why they joined and what each motivator means to them. This exercise will provide an authentic representation of your company.
So, next time you meet a candidate ask, “what do you not have today that you want in your next role?”
