Get the best job candidates to accept your job offer
Once you’ve invested the time and effort to identify the top candidates in your pipeline, your focus is on getting these candidates to accept your job offer. The resources you’ve invested in identifying top candidates are a sunk cost that you can’t recapture regardless of the outcome of your offer. So in order to make sure that the ROI on a well thought out recruiting process remains high, you must stay focused till the end and make the best possible offer to each candidate.
The mistake that many companies make is focusing on compensation and benefits while ignoring all the valuable information you’ve gathered about your candidates during the interview process. Compensation and benefits are commodities, any company can offer them. Most likely there are companies that are able to offer higher compensation and cushier perks than you. So only focusing on these characteristics leaves you at a disadvantage.
To avoid the costs of losing out on good candidates, recruiters and hiring managers need to switch into sales mode. This means building on a connection with a candidate to make the most persuasive argument for your company. The most successful hiring outfits we’ve talked to focus on appeals to candidates potential for impact and common values and beliefs. Rather than talking up the comp package, spend the majority of your offer focused on what is intuitively appealing to a candidate. Leverage all the interview feedback you gathered from the perspective of getting to know what makes a candidate tick.
The final step to improving your acceptance rate is to actually measure it. While it is tempting to seek out industry or peer benchmarks, your biggest goal should be to improve on your own historical rates. Don’t get discouraged if things don’t improve immediately. Like anything, improvement takes time. That said, hiring the best talent is well worth the additional effort that is required to experiment your way towards your most persuasive job offer.
