Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

1. Don’t fumble the kickoff. On the recruiting playing field this is equivalent to the candidate asking about the compensation first, or telling you she’s not interested. It’s also forcing a candidate to apply for the job before she can talk to someone about it, to get a better idea if the job is even worthwhile considering. For better kickoff returns, add a chat feature today to your career website and let your candidates IM a recruiter. Or add a series of FAQs about each job. When calling a candidate on the phone for the first time, whether the person’s active or passive, you must not discuss compensation under any circumstances for at least the first 10-15 minutes! The goal of the first encounter is to switch the conversation to career opportunity and away from compensation, or any other form of “not interested.” (Here’s an article with more on this critical step.) Rather than sell the job, your goal is to sell the next step. In this case, it’s a 10- minute conversation just to figure out if the job is worth getting serious about. A good kickoff return will give you great field position, and this is just as critical in football as it is in recruiting.
2. Get lots of first downs. While you might have a big 30- or 40-yard play now and then, this should be the exception, not the rule. If you’re relying on big plays to score, you’ll lose a lot of candidates who need to move slowly to digest what you’re offering. Force-feeding information at hyper-speed won’t work. A career move requires time for the person to digest the information. Nurturing the candidate along, suggesting another interview or discussion is how this information is best presented in order to be absorbed properly. This is why selling the next step is so important, rather than forcing the candidate to consider the job, the comp, and the location during the first call.
3. Prevent turnovers. Once you begin a drive downfield, don’t do dumb things that cause the deal to instantly fall apart. Recruiters who don’t know the job and managers who over-talk and sell too soon are two examples of recruiting turnovers. Managers who expect top performers to be excited about the job before they know anything about it are the most turnover prone. Turnovers can also be caused when members of the hiring team ask superficial question or are equally clueless about real jobs needs. Lack of professionalism at any step in the hiring process can result in unnecessary turnovers and the loss of some great candidates.
4. Convert your third-downs. Once in awhile you’ll only have one shot to keep the deal alive. For example, if the candidate says she doesn’t like the manager or the job isn’t big enough and wants to withdraw her name from consideration, you’ll have to come up with a big third-down play. In this case, ask the candidate if she’d reconsider if you made the job bigger, or if you could demonstrate that the style the manager used during the interview isn’t the same as his on-the-job persona. Of course, you then have to prove it if the candidate agrees to go forward, but that’s how you convert third-downs and keep the drive alive.
5. Keep the defense honest. Don’t tip your hand too soon. Overselling the candidate, over-talking, and under-listening are equivalent to telling the defense you’re going to pass on every play. This is no way to win a ball game or hire a top performer. Keep the candidate guessing, mention other top candidates, question the candidate’s breadth of experience, and excite the candidate with projects bigger than he’s handled in the past. This is how you keep the person interested throughout the assessment and recruiting process.
6. Time of possession is key. Don’t rush to close. Not only does the candidate need time to evaluate what you’re offering, you’ll increase your close rate by getting the person to invest more time in evaluating your opportunity rather than the competition’s. I suggest more interviews spread over a few days or weeks, rather than pushing them all into one day. Also add a take-home case study and a Profiles International online evaluation for all your candidates once you get serious. (Email info@adlerconcepts.com for information about the Profiles International online evaluation.) The case study allows the candidate a day or two to evaluate a problem likely to be faced on the job with the results presented in a formal give-and-take panel interview. The Profiles is a one-hour cognitive and behavioral style assessment and provides invaluable insight into the candidate. Not only are the results useful, but when candidates agree to participate in these time-consuming tasks, they’re expressing serious interest and increasing their commitment to you.
7. Know your competition. One size doesn’t fit all. Some candidates are interested in security, others want challenging projects, and some want career growth. Customize your approach depending on the candidate’s needs. We suggest a multi-factor close where the candidate rank orders his job requirements. Some of the items to be considered include work content, job stretch, job challenges, growth opportunities, company culture, compensation, security, the hiring manager, and team. (Send us an email, info@adlerconcepts.com, if you’d like to see the whole list.) With this custom playbook you can change your play calling at the line of scrimmage to ensure your candidate gets the information required to make a well thought-out final decision. Of course, evaluate the candidate across multiple factors as well, so stop the traditional series of one-on-one interviews that are both duplicative and exhausting. Instead, consider tours with debriefing sessions, group interviews, some intense one-on-ones, a take-home project, and a business lunch. Then formally debrief using a broad-based selection criteria. (Here’s the 10-factor candidate assessment form we suggest for this.)
8. Maintain a competitive edge throughout the drive. The key to effective recruiting is applicant control. This means staying the buyer from first contact through offer acceptance and final close. As part of applicant control, your job is not only to advance downfield, but recognize that first downs are earned by getting the candidate to agree to something significant at each step in the process. For example, don’t arrange the first interview with the hiring manager unless you get agreement from the candidate that she’ll be looking at the job as a career move with a modest increase in salary. Use the second round of interviews to gain more concessions, like a possible start date and informal agreement on the benefits package. Set the final offer meeting with the candidate agreeing to formally accepting within 24 hours. This is applicant control, and it essential for closing the best entry-level candidates as well as senior executives.
9. Don’t fumble in the red zone. You must score when you’re within sight of the goal line. Make sure you know where you stand compared to the competition on all critical decision factors the candidate is likely to consider. Giving the candidate the multi-factor decision form mentioned above ensures the candidate is looking at the job broadly, and you’re not surprised by their order of importance. This way during the drive to close you can use each subsequent interview step to cover each of these factors. Caution: don’t present the offer too soon or reveal your hand. You haven’t scored yet.
10. Score. Everything has been a waste of time if a candidate says she’s not interested or accepts another offer or counter-offer. Scoring in the game of recruiting means the candidate has accepted your offer on fair terms and shows up on the start date. The best way to score more often is to test every aspect of the offer before you make it. While it’s important not to fumble the kickoff, it’s more important not to fumble on the one-yard line. Before making the offer formal, review the terms in detail and ask the candidate if she’ll accept it on these terms if it’s formally presented without hesitation. If you sense hesitation, side-step the forward progression and find out the concerns. Then ask the person if she’d accept the offer if the concerns were satisfactorily addressed. Uncovering the candidate’s concerns before you make the offer is essential if you want to make more placements. Of course you’ll need to address the concerns to close the deal, but rushing the offer without knowing if the person will accept is naïve at best, and one sure way to lose more candidates than necessary.

Slow down and make more placements. While you want to move as fast as possible, the best people will not move faster than they can absorb the information. They’ll opt-out otherwise. It’s just like being pushed into buying anything that requires some significant degree of comparison shopping and evaluation. Build this slow and steady process into every phase of your recruiting efforts and watch your placement rate soar.

Fumbles, turnovers, incomplete passes, sacks, and failed third-down conversions are all caused by going too fast. Don’t sell the job, sell the next step.

Hewitt’s survey of 411 large companies revealed that 42 percent of companies “are revising their salary budgets and variable pay spending strategies related to the economic downturn or because of increasing cost pressures.” Of that 42%:

• 49 percent plan to reduce variable compensation payouts
• 66 percent will cut bonuses by more than 10 percent in 2008
• Salary increases will be about 3.1 percent in 2009, or about 1 percent smaller than they would have been.

Thirty-eight percent of companies are reserving part of their salary-increase budget for their highest performers. And 23 percent are creating supplemental, discretionary incentive pools for high-performers. Another 20 percent are offering employees retention bonuses for them to stay a certain amount of time.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are:

• Faster. Candidates can gain access to more available jobs within minutes on any day.
• Smarter. Access to salary, compensation, and corporate performance data is everywhere.
• More Connected. Social networks help candidates identify insiders at any employer before or after they apply for any position.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Faster

When job boards came on the scene 10 years ago, they made accessing available job information much easier for candidates. No more digging through the classified section of the Sunday newspaper, crafting up witty cover letters on fluorescent letterhead to get attention and postal mailing resumes. Remember when we’d put our fax numbers on our ads? Come on: how many candidates really had fax machines in their houses? Today, there are “job aggregators” such as indeed.com and simplyhired.com which put all the jobs from multiple job boards into a single search engine that stream directly into any candidate’s personal home page on Google via RSS feeds every day.

I think one of the main reasons that recruiters are after “passive candidates” is that we think we have more time to get them through the interview process, versus “active candidates” who machine-gun apply from job boards to a dozen jobs on any Monday. With the latter, we have to get them setup with an interview within 24 hours and make a hiring decision within two to four days. That’s how fast the market is moving with so much job data available online.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Smarter

In addition to having access to an ocean of jobs, most candidates tap into salary and compensation data via sites such as payscale.com and/or salary.com. Not to mention that the younger generation of workers aren’t shy about sharing their comp levels in the lunchroom or over beers, unlike our parents’ generation who considered salary discussions to be so taboo they would only share this information with the IRS when filing their annual tax returns.

Many recruiters have candidates show up with a salary report printed from one of these salary sites and demand that their pay be at or above the level on the report. Candidates don’t care if our job descriptions aren’t perfectly matching the ones on those websites; they just see the numbers and get an expectation that’s usually out of line with our compensation levels. Regardless of how you handle this situation in your interview process, employers are under pressure to know how their pay grades compare to other major employers in their markets.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are More Connected

Remember when you would get an applicant resume, see which companies a candidate previously worked for, and then quickly find which of your internal employees had worked with the applicant in the past, in order to get “inside information” to determine if they were a good or bad prospect? (Never mind that 51% of people will comment positively or negatively on someone because of how they liked their personality — and not their actual work performance.)

During the interview process, candidates were lucky to run into a former colleague in the hallways. Or if they get lucky in the interview, they will discover who they might know in common with the interviewing managers and try to discover which “moles” they could find within the prospective company, which would help them do their own due diligence on the employer — not to mention that they will try and gain advocates to help them get the job should their interest grow.

Well, because of the growth of social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and many more), the minute most candidates apply for any job (and sometimes even before they apply for a job), they can now instantly see who they know at any prospective employer, all the way back to their old high school or college buddies.

This tilts the access of information toward the candidate community — who can now see if there are bad previous bosses or old enemies working within your company, which they may wish to avoid. The candidates’ reasoning will be if your company hires personalities the candidate disliked, it indicates that your culture prefers those types of individuals, which will have an impact on your employer brand whether you get a chance to enter the conversation or not.

This puts a new pressure on employers to create a working culture that will attract these more web savvy candidates. These Web 2.0 candidates don’t believe most of our career sites’ language about having an exciting work environment. They want to find out for themselves (via networking) what it’s really like to work within the sub-cultures within our company, which are driven by management personalities and business cycles which are exciting to certain candidate types, and a turnoff to others.

The idea here was to increase the likelihood the candidate would not overvalue compensation as the primary decision criteria when selecting one job over another. Since compensation was rarely ideal, broadening the selection criteria this way was a very effective recruiting and negotiating tactic. This week I learned how to make it even better – have candidates rank order the criteria when you first meet them.

As I began to consider this and try it out, I ran across a study prepared by WFD Consulting in a consortium with some major U.S. corporations. Their findings revealed that employees and candidates have varying needs that change over time depending on where they are in their career and family life-cycles. While many companies have addressed these issues in terms of retention, few have incorporated them directly into the recruiting process.

To test this process, give your candidates the following list consisting of these standard job satisfaction factors. After a quick review, have them rank-order the list in order of importance to them:

• Type of work being performed.
• Importance of work being performed, recognition, and impact on the company.
• Career growth and advancement opportunities.
• Hiring manager and ability to be mentored.
• Quality of associates and team members from a professional and personal standpoint.
• Current compensation.
• Benefits.
• Overall job security.
• Long-term compensation.
• Company and culture.
• Company-sponsored learning opportunities.
• Work/life balance, commute.

In the past, I tended to assume a ranking with growth opportunity, the chance to make an impact, the job match, and the hiring manager at the top of the list. For those on the fast track this seemed to hold true over the past 20-plus years, but as the population ages and employee needs differ, it seems important to customize this ranking based on each candidate’s specific needs.

Here are the steps I would follow in using this type of job satisfaction ranking system in the recruiting and closing process:

• Step 1: Once some level of interest is shown in the job, ask the candidate to self-rank the factors. Early-on, if the candidate wants to focus on compensation, suggest that she should look at job satisfaction from multiple perspectives. This is a good way to introduce this multi-factor decision form. Ask the candidate to evaluate her current job on this basis and then ask her to evaluate the best job she’s ever had the same way. This will typically show a striking difference. Then go on to say that she should evaluate your job in this same multi-factor fashion. This alone will allow you to get more candidates interested in what you have to offer. Discuss the order on the list with your candidate from two perspectives. First, make sure the candidate has correctly understood what you’re looking for and is satisfied with the ranking. Next, ask them to justify their rankings. This will help you understand what’s motivating them to look and if you even have a chance of hiring the candidate to fill one of your open positions.
• Step 2: During the interview process have the candidate rank your job on each of these factors. Using this rank-ordered list as guide, provide the candidate the appropriate information in each category. This way, the candidate will have all of the information needed to make a thorough evaluation of your job opening. You might also be able to modify some aspects of the job, if possible, to match your opening to the candidate’s motivating needs. This will go a long way to increase your close rate.
• Step 3: Ask the candidate to compare your job opening to others the candidate is considering using this same ranking scale. Include the candidate’s current job in this comparison. This will help you better understand why the candidate is leaving her current position and what needs to be done to increase the likelihood the person will accept your offer. This information will help you fend off the competition and minimize the chance of a counter-offer.
• Step 4: During the final offer process determine where your company stands in comparison to the competition. As part of the negotiating process, don’t just focus on compensation when putting an offer together. Make sure the candidate considers all aspects of the offer in balance. This type of rank-ordered selection criteria not only makes good sense from the candidate’s perspective when evaluating different job opportunities, it also gives you and your company a head-start by addressing these needs in proactive fashion.

Over the next several months, we’ll be putting together a survey of recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates to better understand how different demographics affect this selection criteria. This will not only help in improving the hiring decision, but it can also be used for onboarding, performance management, and retention.

If you’d like to be part of this, sign-up for my Recruiters Roundtable discussion group. Feel free to comment regarding any factors that have been omitted from the above list and what you’ve discovered as the primary criteria your candidates use when making their acceptance decisions.

While this is somewhat of an experiment, my sense is that it will uncover a new recruiting process that will allow you to better match your job requirements with the candidate’s true motivating needs. In the process, you’ll probably improve quality of hire and make the negotiation less about compensation and more about opportunity, career growth, and work/life balance.