Get to Know Your Annual Search Partners

As a corporate HR person, I used to hold an annual “search partners day” once a year to share business and product development goals, leadership initiatives, and other useful information with our search partners. This was also the day when our retained and contingency search friends could get to know hiring managers and key staffers better by chatting at the breakout sessions. Even the most fiercely competitive contingency folks would show up and chat with one another, on that one event every year. Certainly, they wouldn’t want to miss it. What if you went the next step and asked your chief search partners to schedule a “meet the employer night”? You could send an HR leader and a line executive out to a search partner’s facility and meet present and future candidates, or just anyone from the search professional’s database who wanted to learn more about your organization. As the talent pool shrinks, HR people will have to shed their fortress mentality (“keep them away from me!”) and get out there and mingle with the natives. A company could set itself apart in the local job market and build tremendous near- and long-term candidate relationships by actively seeking ways to expand its future talent network.

Establish a Moderated Yahoo! Group

It takes no money and little effort to establish a moderated Yahoo! group (or other email listserv) for job seekers interested in learning more about your company. A listserv goes one step beyond an email newsletter by letting participants ask questions of you or other members. You could, for example create the “XYZ Corp Talent Pool” discussion group to share information on the company’s plans, new hires, and hiring processes. An online discussion group is also a great place to answer candidates’ questions about working for your company or getting in the door, and ó by observing the conversation ó to spot likely candidates and invite them to take the next step. I’m not aware of a single company that has developed this easy candidate-cultivation resource. If you moderate the email group, untoward or company-bashing comments won’t be published, so the risk of misuse is nil, and the benefits could be tremendous. A follow-up step would be to invite members of your discussion group to participate in your employee referral bonus program or a variation of it. It’s a great way to put your company groupies and followers to work for you.

Take a Hard Look at Your Phone-Screening System

Phone screens are efficient time-savers; they allow you to cut unwieldy resume piles in half quickly. But they suffer from this problem: Capable people can be cut from the list for not being at home when the screener calls. So back up your phone screen process with an email questionnaire that ensures you don’t lose track of talented people the phone screener missed. Use the email questionnaire to invite the candidate to suggest alternate times for a quick phone interview. A 4:00 a.m. phone interview appointment is a small price to pay for making the hire of the year. As the jobs shortage shifts to a talent shortage, candidate-friendly companies will win the gold, and there are precious few of them. Somebody ó maybe you ó has the chance to change the landscape and gain a competitive advantage at the same time. Do you have the guts (not to mention the juice) to promote future talent cultivation as a top-line corporate value for your employer in 2006? The top spot for organizations who value job seekers is there for the taking.

That was a good lesson. Recruiters can have timing problems, too. Very often in the recruitment process, the clock zips along while hiring decisions, background checks, and other hiring-related processes move at the speed of molasses. It’s frustrating, and in a job market where the talent supply is never assured, delays can lose you great hires, as well. So, you fret. You fume. If you’re conscientious about candidate relations, you check in often and spend energy keeping candidates warm. You promise them you’ll do whatever you can to move things along. And you wait. And wait. The cabdriver’s advice makes good sense for recruiters who find themselves watching the clock. When you know, or suspect, that you’ll face delays in closing a deal, you can put that time to good use.

Remember, the deal isn’t done until the candidate accepts, so ask yourself: Even as I sit here waiting for the first big boss to confer with the second big boss and give me the green light to hire this guy, is there anything I can do to cement the offer before it’s made? In other words, are there pre-sales activities you could be checking off that will make the candidate more likely to accept when it’s time to pull the trigger? In most cases, there are. Here are three ways to spend that idle time before a job offer is good to go.

Educate

The more care you take in having your top candidate feel valued, the more likely it is that the offer (when it arrives) will be accepted. You can invite a leading candidate to a (non-sensitive) meeting or to a product demo, or to an outside conference where a company exec is presenting. Every candidate is different, of course, and there are those who will convey to you the message, “Don’t waste my time unless you have an offer letter for me.” But for people who want to learn more and be included, there are plenty to ways to do it before officially inviting them onto the team. By education, of course, I don’t mean “spin.” The closer you move to the finish line, the more complete a picture you need to paint of the job, the workplace culture, and the challenges your newcomer will face. I invited an HR candidate to join our group at a staff meeting, and after the hour-and-a-half session he said to me, “Wow! It was obvious from the discussion that there’s a lot of tension between the HR managers and the finance guys.” “Yup,” I said. We could discuss the situation and strategize ways to make it better. Had I said, “Well, that’s really nothing,” it would have insulted the candidate’s five senses (plus his good intuition) which were screaming Something’s Up.

Inquire

You may think you know all the candidate’s issues and possible reservations. But have you asked the question, “If we were in a position to offer you the position today — which, as you know from our conversations, we’re not quite ready to do — do you think you would accept? What would your questions or issues be?” Learn, even before the offer is put to paper, what obstacles you might run into down the road. My company was this close to hiring a guru software guy and were preparing the offer when I asked the candidate this question. He said that he was very comfortable with everything he’d seen and heard. But, he said, he could only evaluate the software side of our business; he was no hardware guru. He wanted a good friend of his, a hardware type, to be able to come and meet with our technology team, and learn more about our plans — then report back to the software dude. Well — okay, we said. We invited the friend in for the day, showed him around, and ended up hiring them both.

Build Rapport

For lots of candidates, the relationship with the team is the biggest factor in accepting or declining a job offer. As long as the workmates know that the top candidate is just that (a great candidate, not a guy we’ve officially invited to join us), a great way to use the pre-offer downtime is to get some or all of the teammates together with the candidate for a chat. This could happen at the office or at a restaurant down the street, or anywhere else that’s mutually convenient. This conversation isn’t an interview; it’s “What else can we tell you about our work, and our group?” In one situation, I invited a sales candidate to join our team in the booth at a huge trade show. It was his option whether or not to attend, because he wasn’t on board yet ó we hadn’t yet extended the offer. But he came, observed, participated, jumped in, and had a blast. By the end of the day, he said “Now we just have to work together.”

We felt the same way. Had we been unable to extend the offer for some reason, half the leadership team would have extended themselves personally to get this fellow a job working with one of our partners — it was obvious he was top-drawer talent. Every business has some equivalent of the day-in-a-trade-show-booth experience where the pace and intensity of the work make for supercharged rapport-building, or, in the worst case, really good evidence that this match is not going to work. These steps are appropriate when delays in the hiring process are caused by company processes and not by issues or concerns about the candidate himself or herself. Every experienced recruiter knows that once a valued candidate has become jazzed about the opportunity, a week of silence from the employer can sour the most promising deal. But if you get creative about ways to keep the candidate engaged and enthusiastic while you’re waiting for the wheels to turn, you can use that downtime to your advantage and make the newbie’s eventual arrival smoother at the same time.