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ESPN’s Bruce Feldman’s new book “Meat Market” chronicles the business of recruiting in big-time college football, with a focus on Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron. In his talk with ERE, you may get ideas (including when he discusses “negative recruiting”) that can work in the corporate America.

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After a lengthy screening process, the hiring committee feels it has found the right candidate for the company. Now comes the tricky part: how do you design an offer and go through the offer stage of the process without damaging the relationship with the candidate?

Many companies are not prepared to go through the offer step of the process. As a result, they damage the relationship with the candidate. This leads to one of two unfortunate conclusions. Either they lose the candidate or the candidate comes on board, but with scar tissue. Applying some of the best practices from the sales world into a sales talent screening program helps to avoid that scenario.

The offer stage of the hiring process parallels the proposal phase of sales. Best practices in sales say that you don’t present a proposal until a thorough needs analysis has been completed. If a sales person is presenting a proposal to a prospect, he has acquired the information needed to design a solution, has discussed budget, has a full understanding of their solution requirements, and has set an expectation on pricing. This is certainly the case if the salesperson is going to be successful in winning the account.

Looking at this process in relation to the offer stage of the sales talent screening program, many of the same best practices from sales hold true. During the screening program, information needs to be gathered from the candidate to determine their financial requirements. Unfortunately, many sales talent screening programs focus exclusively on screening the candidate for fit, but do not consider the needs for the offer phase of the process. This leads to a last-minute scurry to mine the information from the candidate, or they design the offer blindly. Neither of those are best practices for the offer stage.

In sales, it is said that if you are going to lose, lose early. This prevents you from making a huge investment in a relationship that will not generate revenue. The parallel to screening sales talent is understanding the financial requirements of the candidate early enough to stop the process before over-investing in the relationship. There is no point in continuing a process with a candidate who requires a compensation level 25% above what you can offer. This probably seems logical, but hiring executives rarely focus on this as a de-selection element early in the process.

Just like discussing pricing with a prospect, the financial-needs discussion requires finesse. The candidate knows that you are asking questions about their financials, just like a prospect knows a sales person is fishing for budget information. The better-skilled salespeople tell their prospects, “I don’t want to waste your time by getting you excited about a solution that will not fit in your budget constraints…”

In much the same way, this discussion can be had with the candidate, “I don’t want to excite you about an opportunity that might not be a match for your financial needs. As you look at making a change in position, what thoughts have you given to your compensation requirements?”

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I’ve been around a lot of years, and I can’t remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives, and company leaders didn’t complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along, we were promised the solution was at hand.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

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For most recruiters the make or break moment comes at the end of the process, when it’s time to negotiate the offer. A successful negotiation means that the process concludes with a hire, and the recruiter rides off into the sunset.

But a successful negotiation doesn’t mean coming out on top with a low-ball offer that gets accepted. That can cause the candidate to get turned off and in the worst-case result in the candidate walking away. Even if accepted, it could leave the candidate with a sour taste in the mouth and essentially starting off with a negative attitude toward the employer. An overly generous offer on the other hand is a waste of the employer’s resources and can upset internal equity. Getting it right is not easy as few recruiters are trained in negotiating.

The number of books that have been written on negotiating can fill a large room — several thousand are in print. But an easier approach can be discerned from recent research at Northwestern University. A study by Prof. Adam Galinsky and his colleagues suggests that a powerful way to influence the outcome to be closer to a win-win situation is to view the situation from the candidate’s perspective — also know as the perspective-taking approach.

What this means and how it works is explained below, but the research has demonstrated that recruiters using such an approach consistently achieve the highest level of economic efficiency, without sacrificing their own material interests. They produce a better overall outcome for both sides.

Getting Inside the Candidate’s Head

The perspective approach means try to get inside the candidate’s head. To achieve an understanding of the candidate — their motives and likely behaviors — consider the world from their viewpoint. Basically, put yourself on their side of the table. This is not as ridiculous as it may appear. The research demonstrates that recruiters adopting such an approach achieve the best possible outcome close to half the time.

To be able to do this well recruiters need to do their homework before arriving at the negotiation. First, have an understanding of the likely issues. These always fall into three categories.

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The best recruiters I know execute the fundamentals of recruiting well and have developed good “habits” within each step of the recruitment process.

One simple, but powerful referral sourcing technique is closing each recruitment cold call with the question: “Can you do me a favor?”

As we all know, much has been much written about overcoming the objection “I am not interested…” or “I am happy; thanks, but no thanks…”

But in reality, you will not be able to turn a “no” into a “yes” in many (if not most) of these situations.

Yes, they might listen to your message (or pitch) but in the majority of cases, they won’t be interested or, they won’t be qualified.

Of course, when this happens, it is your job to network with this person to get referrals. Your ability to extract referrals and/or leads to help you with your search depends on many factors; including (among others):

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A great recruiter should have the same skill sets and qualifications of a great salesperson. All of the great sales visionaries including Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins have taught these steps to sales professionals around the world, yet few recruiters today understand or use any of these available resources.

So much emphasis has been placed on prospecting or sourcing potential candidates that recruiters are not taught the basics of the sales process that follows the sourcing function. Having listened to thousands of third-party and corporate recruiters over the past 15 years, my sense is that less than 10% of recruiters understand basic sales principles.

Although the terminology may differ, the following are the critical steps to every successful sales professional or recruiting professional.

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It seems that nearly every recruiter, at some point in his or her career, has been forced to present an offer that was an insult to the candidate and an embarrassment for the recruiter.

In the first part of this series, I addressed actions that can be taken prior to initiation of the recruiting process and in the initial stages of the recruiting process. Now my attention will turn to actions that can be taken during the offer phase of the recruiting cycle and a listing of non-monetary offer components that often don’t receive the focus they should.

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I recently overheard several people talking about an employment offer one of them had recently received. The candidate, who has received three promotions in three years with her current company, was so under-whelmed with the offer that she was insulted and happy to discuss her disgust with others.

The offer, from a well-known company, required the candidate to take a drop in title, relocate to a city with a significantly higher cost of living at her own expense, and all for a $1,500/year increase in salary. Having spent a month chatting on the phone and in person with the company, this candidate was frustrated. Unfortunately, this situation happens all the time.

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It’s the million-dollar question in recruiting that almost no one asks. It’s a simple question, and one that car salespeople around the world ask: “What is it going to take to get you in this car?”

Regardless of industry or geography, every salesperson worth their weight in salt asks some variant of this question at some point early on in the sales cycle.

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I am sure that you have been there. You have a candidate you’ve been working with for a few weeks and you have built a solid relationship.

The candidate has been on a couple interviews with the hiring manager. Things are going well as the candidate and the client are each delighted with the thought of going forward.

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The fight for top talent is intense and it will get worse. Interim results from our 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey (this is the last week you can still take the survey) indicate that the number of offers being turned down is increasing, ad response is declining along with candidate quality, and turnover is increasing. In my opinion, without great recruiters implementing best practices for every search, these problems will not go away.

The purpose of this “On Becoming a Great Recruiter” series is to give recruiters hands-on tactics to hire great people, one search at a time. Over the past seven weeks, we’ve covered the entire recruiting process from the beginning to almost the end. In Part 2, we described how to use performance profiles rather than job descriptions when taking the assignment. In Part 3, we described what it takes to write and position ads that compel the best to apply. Part 4 focused on finding top passive talent using tools like ZoomInfo to identify and network with the best around. In Parts 5 and 6, we described how to conduct a performance-based interview that was not only simple to use and more accurate than traditional behavioral interviewing, but it also gave recruiters the information needed to defend candidates against managers who make superficial assessments. Part 7 focused on negotiating and closing offers on opportunity rather than compensation.

This week, we need to make sure that all of your hard work doesn’t fall apart at the last moment by having a candidate renege after accepting your offer. To minimize this problem, start by summarizing the big reasons people turn down offers:

• They accepted a counteroffer.

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When someone says “no” to your offer, your goal is not to convince him to say “yes.” Your goal is to get him to say “maybe.” Recruiting and hiring top people who have multiple offers or who are passive candidates is not easy. They won’t put up with weak recruiters, weak hiring managers, or an unprofessional hiring process. The purpose of this series on “Becoming a Great Recruiter” is to provide recruiters with the tools and techniques they need to deal with the challenges of hiring the best.

You should take our 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey if you want to compare your team’s or your personal performance to other recruiters. Handling objections, overcoming concerns, dealing with counteroffers, and candidates saying “no” is part of the daily grind of every top recruiter. Expect it. In fact, be concerned when these problems don’t come up. In this article, you’ll discover how to uncover and address these concerns. As you get better, you’ll develop new techniques to anticipate and address the problem before the candidate even brings it up. You’ll know you’re a top 10% recruiter when you’re able to do this consistently. Confidently handling a situation in which a candidate decides to opt out of your hiring process involves three basic steps: uncovering the problem, suggesting alternatives, and getting the candidate to agree to move ahead. Good salespeople who represent customized products or services know that uncovering and dealing with concerns is the key to closing more business.

The same is true when dealing with top people who are looking at your job opening as a career move, and not just another job. To begin, you’ll need to eliminate the transactional hurry-up recruiting model based largely on salary and start date if you use this approach. Then, you need to have a clear understanding of real job needs (reread Part 2 and these articles) before you start sourcing. The downside of hiring top people is that it takes a lot longer, and these candidates demand a lot more information like the scope of the job, hiring manager and team competency, company strength, location, opportunities for growth, and complete disclosure on short- and long-term compensation. So be prepared to give it to them in small bites, especially when they hesitate. To uncover possible deal-breakers early on, always ask what the person likes and doesn’t like about the job after every interview.

As long as there is some level of interest, all you need to do to keep the process moving forward in the early stages is to just say that you’ll make sure that these issues are addressed in the next round of interviews. Then, ensure they’re covered to the candidate’s satisfaction. When you’re down to two or three candidates, ask the person if she wants to be on the short list of final candidates. If the candidate says no, it’s time to use a solution-selling technique called “closing upon an objection” to uncover the problem and keep the deal alive. First, ask your candidate why she wants to opt-out of the process, and then validate it. Assuming, for example, the problem is associated with the scope of the job, ask something like this: “I can understand why you might be concerned that the job isn’t big enough for you. But, let me ask you this: If we can demonstrate that the job is in fact bigger than your current understanding, or if we could make it bigger, would you be willing to come back for a final round of interviews?” The key here is that you don’t have to solve the problem. You just need to ask that if it could be solved to the candidate’s satisfaction, would she be willing to move on to the next step in your hiring process? If the person agrees to go forward, you’ve probably uncovered the primary concern. Unfortunately, many times the person will still say “no,” meaning the initial concern was just a smokescreen.

To figure out the real problem, use the same close-upon-a-concern technique as you inquire about other concerns, always asking that if these could be satisfactorily addressed, would the person agree to go forward? When the candidate finally agrees to proceed, you’ve identified the real problem. Of course, then you have to solve it, and unfortunately not all problems are solvable. For example, “I think the hiring manager is a real jerk,” might be difficult to overcome even with an, “If I can prove to you he’s not,” counterargument - especially if the person is a real jerk. While you won’t close every deal using the close-upon-a-concern technique, you’ll close many more than normal, and you’ll better understand the reasons why when you lose some. This is how you move the hiring process forward by taking modest “maybe, if…” steps before you get to “yes, I’ll accept your offer.” When negotiating the actual details of the offer, you can use another form of this same process. The principle here is to never make your offer formal unless you’re 100% sure it will be accepted on the spot. You do this by testing. Testing is important if too many of your offers get rejected; if many candidates say, “I have to think about it” after receiving the offer; or, if some of your candidates say “yes” but later renege.

While we want to give candidates plenty of thinking time before they’re ready to accept your offer on the spot, if you make the offer formal before they’re ready to accept it, you won’t find out any potential problems that could have been resolved. Here’s how the “testing the offer” process works. It’s based on the sales techniques known as secondary or trial closing. The simplest way to use this technique is to just ask the candidate if she would be in a position to accept an offer if something satisfactory were put together. If the person says “yes,” find out what she considers satisfactory. You’ll have to negotiate around this point a bit, but when some rough agreement is reached, ask the person if an offer with these terms were made, when she could start. If you get a specific start date like October 17th or two weeks from Monday, you’ll close this person. Anything vague or general like “in a few weeks” or “I’ll have to think about it” is a cause of concern. It means the person isn’t even ready to consider an offer from your company. In this case, you’ll have to find out what the underlying problems are by repeating the close-upon-a-concern techniques described above. However, don’t stop testing even if the person does agree to a tentative start date and you believe the person is ready to accept your offer. Use this approach to test the next step: “If we could put a formal offer together this week under the terms discussed, when would you be in a position to formally sign and accept the offer?” Anything other than “right away” is a clue that the candidate has other opportunities or that your offer is not all it’s cracked up to be. Again, back up and uncover any other potential problems, resolve them if possible, and then ask when the person will be in a position to accept your offer. Of course, some issues are not resolvable. But the techniques described here give you a good chance.

One last test you should use, even if the person said she’ll accept your offer, is by saying something like, “I’m ready to get the offer approved today under the terms we discussed. If Bill (the hiring manager) meets you for lunch tomorrow to make if official, are you in a position to tell him you’ll accept it, other than reading the fine print, and signing it within 24 hours?” The point here is to get the candidate to formally state she’ll say “yes” to your offer with the only contingency being reviewing the key terms, discussing it with her key advisors, and getting back to you the next morning. Under no circumstances should you give a person another three or four days to accept your offer. You’re just asking for problems. When this process is conducted properly, the candidate has just had three to five days to seriously consider every term of your offer. If, after all of this work, you then get a last minute “I have to think about it,” your deal is likely dead. While we want candidates to think about all of the terms of your offer in great depth and take a reasonable time to do it, you don’t want the candidate to use your offer as a negotiating tool with other companies or as leverage to obtain a counteroffer.

Being deliberate and thorough in this closing process is how you make your offer the last one the candidate receives. Doing this every time for every candidate is why great recruiters close more deals, especially the tough ones.

If you’ve followed the advice provided in the previous four articles, you’re now finding more top active and passive candidates. Finding top people is actually easier than hiring them (Part 2 and Part 3).

Here’s why: First, they won’t accept offers unless they’re for bigger jobs with better long-term prospects than their current jobs or competing offers. That’s why taking the assignment and preparing performance profiles are so important (Part 1). You need to understand real job needs to present a convincing case that the job you’re representing offers a true career opportunity.

Second, top people who are in demand generally want a nice bump in compensation as an incentive to accept one offer over another. The situation is worsened because these people are generally already at the top end of their salary ranges for comparable positions. However, you can alleviate these problems if you know how to use the interview to shift the decision to accept an offer from one based on compensation to one based on opportunity. This is what we’ll cover in this article. First, you should retake the online recruiter diagnostic to determine how you’ve progressed so far in becoming a top 10% recruiter. Then, you should take our current Recruiting Challenges 2006 survey. Especially review the questions on recruiter compensation.

Once you learn how to use the interview to both assess competency and negotiate offers, you’ll be able to command compensation for yourself in the upper half of the ranges shown in the survey. Many recruiters, and just about everyone in HR and OD, think that the primary purpose of an interview is to assess candidate competency. Yet, this is only one of many competing objectives, with the most important being the need to use the interview to demonstrate to your awesome candidate that she is not as awesome as she thinks she is in comparison to the job you’re representing. Now that you know the ending, let me start at the beginning.

When I left Corporate America to become a third-party recruiter, I was very good at finding and identifying top people for jobs I was quite familiar with, including staff to mid-management spots in operations, as well as engineering and finance/accounting jobs for manufacturing and distribution companies. In those days, the key to recruiter success was networking. While I could always find the right people, many deals fell apart because the compensation plans offered were not attractive enough. To minimize this, I developed a two-pronged recruiting strategy. The first was to get my hiring manager clients to shift their decision to performance and potential rather than skills and experience. Creating a performance profile opened up these jobs to a broader range of candidates with high potential, but with a slightly different mix of skills, lighter experience, and generally lower compensation. The second part of the strategy was to start convincing candidates early in the recruiting process that compensation shouldn’t be the reason for evaluating or taking a new opportunity.

To accomplish this, I just asked candidates if they would be open to explore a career opportunity if it could be demonstrated that the job offered was at least 10-15% bigger than their current jobs, and that it was growing 5-10% faster per year. I then went on to say that this should be the basis for their decision to accept an offer or not, even if the compensation increase itself was modest. This point was stressed by presenting evidence that those people who made compensation the primary reason for accepting one offer over another usually were disappointed when they discovered that the jobs themselves were not as substantive as they had hoped. Most accepted the logic, and over 90% agreed to proceed on this basis. Now, all I had to do was prove to them that the job offered both immediate stretch and increased long-term growth. I’ve written about performance-based interviewing before, but to demonstrate job stretch you need to be especially good at two parts: 1) conducting an in-depth work history review; and 2) digging deep into the candidate’s major accomplishments. During the work history review, you need to find out why the person changed jobs, how successful these transitions were, the scope and scale of the jobs held, the person’s trend of growth over time, the types of work where the person excelled, any recognition received for doing great work at each position, and the types of people the person worked with, including the breadth of management or project responsibility.

Since you’ll be negotiating the offer on job stretch, during this work history review you need to specifically look for areas where the candidate is deficient in comparison to your job needs. This generally involves factors like the size of the budget managed, the team size, the chance to do and learn different things, the complexity of the task, exposure to different types of people, and the importance of the job in relationship to the overall company business strategy. But, telling (or selling) the candidate about these doesn’t help the negotiation process. It’s far better if the candidate internalizes or figures out for herself where she’s deficient.

One way to pull this off is to challenge the candidate a little bit by suggesting that while she has great skills in one area, the job itself might be a bit of a stretch in another. Here’s an example: “While I’m quite impressed with your technical depth, this job might be a real challenge for you in the areas of dealing directly with our major clients in negotiating product requirement specifications. Can you give me an example of a major accomplishment in which you’ve done something comparable?” If you have conducted an in-depth work history review, the candidate will more likely trust your judgment and will see this as an important skill to add to her resume. Better, she will shift her attitude and attempt to convince the interviewer that she’s capable of handling the task. Now, you’ll need to spend 10 minutes or so digging deep into the accomplishment to validate the person’s skills. Even being a little skeptical helps, but, in the end, the person will clearly understand the importance of the task and your professionalism in understanding her capabilities. If you do this a few times for other critical tasks, the candidate will clearly understand where the job offers real stretch. To create long-term growth, you can use a similar accomplishment question, but with a twist. In this case, rather than challenging the candidate, offer an inducement by tying the job to some major company initiative.

Here’s an example: “One of our major challenges in this job is to lead the launch of a new series of products. We’re putting significant resources into this product and assigning some of our best people to run it. Can you tell me about your most significant product launch accomplishment?” Again, you’ll need to spend about 10 minutes digging into this accomplishment to understand the candidate’s role, the challenges faced, the decisions made, and how comparable it is to your needs, the environment, the team, and the culture. As you do this, you might uncover some areas where the candidate is a bit deficient compared to your needs. Then, you can suggest that you have a bit of a concern here, but probe further and see if the candidate has overcome comparable deficiencies.

The key to all of this is to dig deep into the person’s accomplishments and then compare these to real job needs. If the person is a top person and the job is significant, you should easily be able to find areas that offer 10-15% job stretch and 5-10% job growth. To do this properly, you must know real job needs and be a pro at the interviewing process suggested. To accept an offer with only a modest increase in compensation, the person must be convinced that the job offers both immediate stretch plus long-term growth. The interviewing method suggested above starts this process. But, don’t stop here. Recruiters can only facilitate the process. The hiring manager and hiring team need to become personally involved in the recruiting and selection process. This includes spending extra time conducting this type of in-depth interview, taking the candidate to lunch or dinner, handling follow-up calls, and even making the offer some type of big event. All of this helps, since the candidate not only must internally justify the decision to accept your offer with less compensation, but she must also justify it to her circle of personal advisors and even to her boss when she turns in her resignation.

To help this along, give the candidate a marketing version of the performance profile summarizing the major tasks, challenges, and opportunities. Collectively, this is how you use the interview to switch the decision criteria for accepting your offer from one based on compensation to one based on opportunity. This is a critical process you’ll need to learn and implement if you want to become a top 10% recruiter placing top 10% people.

Over the next eight weeks, you have a chance to learn what it takes to become one of the top recruiters in the country. This means you’ll be able to make at least $150,000-$175,000 per year; you’ll be seen as a true career consultant by your candidates and a true partner by your clients.

Bottom line: What this means is that you’ll make more placements with better people more quickly while negotiating on opportunity, not compensation. However, to get to be a high-earning, well-respected recruiter, you’ll need to try out the techniques presented in this article. Most likely, many of them will run counter to your current approach. It’s in these areas that you’ll have to work harder to overcome your beliefs and still try out the ideas. This is how you grow, and getting through these rough spots is the key to personal change management. So, put some extra effort in here. But enough of the talk. Let’s get started on getting better.

First, I want you to write down the one single thing you need to do to become a better recruiter. Whether it’s making cold calls, taking the assignment, negotiating offers, or whatever, I want you to focus on improving this one skill over the next eight weeks. This focused intensity will allow you to extract something meaningful from each of these articles and apply it directly to your work.

Feel free to email me the area you’ve chosen for personal improvement, but beware - if you tell me now, you’ll need to tell me in eight weeks how you got better. Here are the eight key topics we’ll be covering during this series, and a few tips to get you started right away.

1. Benchmarking your performance. Since this a project, and not just a series of articles to read, you’ll first need to figure how good you are today. Take this recruiter diagnostic right now to get started. At the end of the project, you’ll take the same diagnostic again to see how much you’ve improved. We’ll also be taking a big survey as part of this. It will be the first to collect critical recruiter performance metrics like requisitions handled by recruiter, sendouts per hire, placements per month, and income. Sign up here if you want to be part of this important study.

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Before you begin reading this article, write down all of the reasons your candidates and hiring manager clients give you for not moving forward. Here’s my list. How does your own compare?

• Don’t have time to talk.

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“What do you mean you changed your mind? I thought you really wanted this position? Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Many of us have heard this or some version of this at some point in our careers. You have a candidate going through a process, and then you get surprised because he or she has suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly) had a change of heart. This is not uncommon. People making a career change are going through an emotionally-charged experience. In the process, people tend to get defensive and are reluctant to fully communicate their interests or reveal to you that they have other “irons on the fire.”

This is where up-front operating agreements come in to play. When properly used, an up-front operating agreement/contract will help a recruiter mitigate the tangles that will inevitably develop throughout the evaluation and hiring processes. Up-front operating agreements are quite simple and should be used early on in a candidate relationship. The first agreement I put in place is an agreement about agreements. I always ask a candidate if he or she is the type of person who tends to honor agreements when he or she makes them with other people. Everyone says “yes” to this one; who wouldn’t? But something else is happening. The candidate is also giving you permission to ask for commitments at different points, and at the risk of sounding inconsistent or at worst, psychotic, he or she will tend to stick to these commitments. Then, I always follow up with an out clause which puts people at ease. I ask, “From time to time, I may ask you to commit to something. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, it’s okay to tell me so. One of my biggest fears is a person who says ‘Yes’ to something when he or she actually means ‘No.’ People do this because they are polite and don’t want to be confrontational in most cases. Are you able to come forward to me if something doesn’t feel right, or if you want to halt or slow down our process?” And, you reinforce this contract several times through your process, by asking again, “Are you sure you are comfortable with this?”

You’ve got to let the candidate know that you will not attack him or her if he or she starts to get a funny feeling; you have to explicitly let him or her know that in an emotionally-charged process, he or she will most likely feel uncomfortable, and when this happens, you (the recruiter) are the best person to call. When a candidate gets that funny feeling, wouldn’t you prefer to know about it as soon as possible? You’re essentially letting the candidate know that you will not use pressure tactics. You operate in an environment of truth, and you give the candidate an incentive to be truthful. You’ll be amazed. The candidate will be relieved that he has finally found someone in which he can confide. It’s quite therapeutic for the candidate because all the other recruits will be pushing and shoving him or her to “just go out on an interview and see how it goes.” You, on the other hand, are not only a broker of jobs or a conduit to a new job, but also a confidant.

If you were a candidate, to whom would you be more loyal: someone pushing you though a process, or someone in whom you hold considerable trust because you have facilitated very open lines of communication? Let’s say that one day you’re sitting at your desk, posting an advertisement on one of the major job boards, and your phone rings. The person calling you is a candidate who is about to get an offer from your client. The candidate says, “I’m having second thoughts about leaving this job for your client’s, and I want to discuss it with you. Have you got a minute?” You bet you have a minute. You have all the time that candidate needs. “Remember when you told me if I was not comfortable with something, I should call you to discuss it?” Now, you can fix the problem, if it is in fact fixable. Or, at the very least, you can prevent yourself from looking inept in the eyes of your client. You want all of the what-ifs out in the open, and when you put in place up-front operating agreements, you create a relationship in which revealing these things is not something that causes discomfort in an already uneasy person.

As you may have figured from Part 1 of this series, there many categories of “right days.” Identifying them requires just six basic approaches. Much of this falls under customer relationship management or business intelligence, which unfortunately, most corporate recruiters know little about. However, if you’re unsure of the process or how to do it, just talk to any of your top salesperson or any external executive search professional who routinely does these things as part of their professional life. The six basic approaches required:

1. Read business papers and magazines. The purpose is to identify when newsworthy companies have positive, negative, or dramatic business events
2. Watch the weather. Watch the weather channel and read the weather section of the newspaper to identify geographic areas where people are likely to want to “flee” because of recent horrible weather.
3. Use CRM systems. Customer relationship management systems can be used to track birthdays, performance appraisal days, bonus periods, graduation dates from college, etc., and send out customized communications relative to each.
4. Leverage your network. Emails and telephone calls to a target candidate’s colleagues and friends asking them about positive and negative events in a target candidate’s life can reveal occurrences that lead to frustration and anxiety. Identifying and staying in touch with “super knowers” (they just seem to know everyone and everything that’s going on) is an excellent approach. Attending professional meetings is a great way to pick up on potential happy and unhappy times for your target candidate as well.
5. Search the Internet. Many corporate websites release information about promotions and major business events in their PR section. Personal websites, myspace.com, sales leads from credit reports, or even Google searches on the person’s name can come up with an amazing amount of information which indicate “right and wrong days.”
6. Practice common sense. Common sense and experience will tell you that there are certain days where people reconsider their life, independent of the work year or family events. Those days include birthdays, New Year’s Eve, the last day of school (if they have children), and the worst weather days.

Ask Them at the Right Time of Day

If you get into the science (yes it is a science, not an art), you soon realize that in addition to the day, the time of day and the location where you make the request are also critical. Any salesperson or fisherman will tell you that there are certain “right times” during the day that are optimal to reel in your catch. Some of those might include:

• Late in the day, at which time many professionals have been exposed to more opportunities that tire and frustrate them.
• At the very beginning of the day, before they began, when they realize they are facing an insurmountable pile of work.
• Any day you can catch them working after hours at the office.

Ask Them at the Right Place

Do your homework and find out which location makes them most likely to say yes. You might start by asking them or their friends what location they were at when they said yes to their current job.

• Lunch, breakfast, or dinner conversations often have a greater impact.
• Have a drink. People tend to think differently after a little alcohol.
• Talk to them in person. Some people can easily turn down someone on the phone but can’t do it face-to-face.
• Talk to them at a conference, where most people have their guard down.
• Talk to them at your firm’s office, where they might “feel the love” from other employees that would like to see them come onboard.
• Give them a call at home right after dinner, where, for instance, the spouse might ask “what was that about” after you call. That conversation with a spouse might get you a return call that never would have occurred if you called while they were at the office.

You can also increase your odds of getting a reluctant candidate to say yes if you:

• Involve the family in helping you sell.
• Sell their references on how great your company is.
• Influence the public by building your company’s external employment brand so that friends and acquaintances “talk up” your firm.

But What Would Denny Crane or Miss Manners Say?

Now for those that say that what recruiters are doing here is taking advantage of someone’s misery or that they are violating some fairy-tale ethical code, my answer is “Yes, we are.” But these approaches also offer candidates an opportunity to get out of that misery. Great recruiters identify when candidates are vulnerable and use that time period to get them to say yes, just like most potential fiancees, salespeople, and smart children who ask for an advance on their allowance! Great recruiters take advantage of opportunities and openings, while other recruiters get 100 percent of their information from candidate resumes and later scratch their heads and complain because, inexplicably, “the best candidates always turn us down.” Also, for those HR pseudo-lawyers without law degrees, using someone’s birthday or personal event to recruit is perfectly fine because you are using the information in order to proactively offer them an opportunity. Discrimination occurs when you do not offer someone a position because of their age or other personal information. Privacy can be an issue, but generally people don’t complain when you use personal information to offer them a great job that pays them more money. Most privacy issues relate to individuals using your personal data to take the money you already have, not to offers to give you more money and better opportunities — which, incidentally, you can turn down at any time.

Conclusion

It’s important to realize upfront that asking a candidate to apply for job or accept an offer requires precise timing. It’s just a fact that the same offer given to a candidate on one day will get a no while making the same offer at the appropriate time or place will get a resounding yes. If this “new approach” makes you nervous, go talk to your salespeople and the retained search firms that you use and see if they don’t already use a similar approach. Don’t be surprised if you encounter resistance to this approach, because outside-the-box approaches make people resistant to change nervous. “Nervous nellies” who see a hundred reasons why you shouldn’t use this, or any new approach, are the same ones who hire third-party recruiters to do exactly the same thing for them. But just because someone else does it out of sight, it is somehow okay. Hunt on the right day yourself and you will have good hunting!

If you were going to ask someone to marry you, you would know almost instinctively that there are certain times when your chances of getting a yes improve dramatically. Asking on Valentine’s Day, for example, would most likely get a yes, while asking on the day a close friend died would not only be in bad taste ó it would undoubtedly generate a no. Smart recruiters realize that it’s not just the attractiveness of the offer that gets reluctant candidates to say yes. It’s also the timing.

Look at a widely recognized recruiting event as an example. Let’s say you are trying to attract Shaquille O’Neal away from the Lakers when Phil Jackson was his coach. You could literally ask him if he was interested in another team, and each time he would sincerely say no. However, the day after Phil Jackson retired as coach, his answer might be an enthusiastic yes. The same “right day” phenomenon occurs when you’re asking a friend for a loan or asking your boss for a raise. Every recruiter encounters individuals whom they’re trying to attract, maybe over a period of months or years, who consistently turn them down. The candidates are polite about it, but they always say, “No, I’m happy where I am now.” The lesson to be learned is that while they consistently say “no,” there will be some days where the they would say yes to an offer to interview even though they said no emphatically the day before. The key is learning how to identify the “right day.”

Right Days and Wrong Days to Offer Someone a Chance for a New Opportunity

• Wrong day: Any day during the week before a targeted individual is expected to hear about whether they got their expected promotion.

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They say that cabdrivers and barbers give the best advice, and I got some excellent advice from a cabdriver one day. He said, “What’s your biggest problem?” and I said, “I don’t like my job, but I need to stay in the company a couple more years in order to improve my resume.” “Okay,” said the cabbie, “so you feel stuck. Here’s what you do. You put that time to work for you.” Upon reflection, the cabdriver was dead-on in his observation. Rather than fighting my captive state, I needed to put every month of my self-imposed sentence to good use. I got straight to work, racking up assignments and resume fodder (and, in the process, I’d like to think, making a contribution to the company) right away. As long as I’ve got to stick around here, I thought, I’ll make full use of the calendar!

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.

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Obviously, Murphy was a recruiter. If he did something else for a living, he would have been a bit more optimistic. Whether you believe in Murphy’s sad bromide or not, as a recruiter it is a good idea to do all that you can to avoid becoming one of its victims. But in the last month or so, I have seen it happen: recruiters who have been around long enough to know better saying or assuming things they shouldn’t be saying or assuming. Almost verbatim, they are stated below. If you ever find yourself saying any of these things or making any of these assumptions, think again!

1. “This deal is a slam dunk.” I think not. Fast and easy deals are usually neither. If you think you are working on a slam dunk hire, go back to the drawing board and look at everything that can possibly go wrong. Look at the candidate’s commute, compensation, title, job stretch, and everything else that relates to the candidate, the job itself, and the fit between the two. If you still think it’s a slam dunk hire, have another recruiter grill you on the details. If there is something you are not seeing, it is better to find out before the deal falls apart than after.

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