A topic that is close to a lot of people’s hearts and a challenge that recruiters experience more and more in today’s candidate short market.
When a candidate tells you that they’re actually involved in multiple processes whilst also working with you, it’s a bit like someone saying ‘yeah, I’m sort of dating you because I think we could work but I’m also dating four or five other people at the same time’. Immediately your heart drops, immediately you know the likelihood of you getting success is diminished.
In this Learning Live, Alex looks at how you as a recruiter can keep in touch with candidates and build strong relationships to ensure you don’t fall victim to any unwelcome surprises, as that’s the most important thing.
There’s nothing worse than finding out a candidate has another offer pending or has another interview process pending at offer stage, because by then it’s too late to influence the whole situation.
Alex goes through some of the challenges that we encounter and talks about why it’s important that they’re addressed. Then he will provide five ways of trying to manage the situation.
“Building strong relationships with candidates to ensure you don’t fall victim to any unwelcome suprises is the most important element of the recruitment process”.
First and foremost, why are candidate short markets leading the candidates to get multiple offers?
Well, the reality is if you speak to a lot of candidates that are in demand, they’re getting peppered with invites every day in LinkedIn. Just as you’re detailed and passionate about sourcing, there’s hundreds and thousands of other recruiters that are looking for similar people at similar times.
In some ways, it’s about expecting those candidates to get multiple offers. Often nowadays clients have longer processes. They’re more likely to involve HR and testing and we’re more likely to be working through third party intermediaries like internal recruitment and HR or portals.
What that means is the slower the process, the more that candidate is open and out there in the market, the more likely they are to be receptive to multiple opportunities.
Remember, whilst they might be ignoring all the requests that come in day to day, as soon as they start looking with you, they’ll probably start looking at everything else that’s out there too. Nobody wants to put all their eggs in one basket.
Another reason why this is a big issue is that increasingly recruiters are having digital only relationships with candidates. In today’s market, I see recruiters that are not meeting their candidates face to face like I used to, or not even using Skype. As a result, there’s less of a connection between the recruiter and the candidate and therefore it becomes easier for candidates to let you down or drop you in it.
During this Learning Live, Alex discusses five ideas that you as a recruiter can implement in order to help you minimise the issues that arise from candidates that are working through multiple offers.
In summary, his tips are:
1. Assume there’s competition
Often what happens is we call a candidate and immediately ask them if they’re working with anyone else. We ask begrudgingly as we obviously don’t want to hear bad news and we’re perfectly aware that most likely the candidate is going to say yes. But as a result of that tone, you may then hear the answer that you want to hear but not necessarily the answer that the candidate wants to tell us.
So instead of positioning the question as ‘are you working with anyone else?’, turn this into an assumptive question.
2. Focus on building a relationship with candidates
The only thing that’s going to get the candidate to want to share with you where they’re at with other offers, the only thing that’s going to get them to be open is your investment as a recruiter in their emotional bank account.
3. Encourage Discontent
Encourage candidates to be open about what’s not right. Often, when a candidate says ‘well I’m not sure about this’ we get defensive and try to answer those objections quickly. This then programs in the candidates mind that they no longer want to share bad news as they don’t want to be put under pressure.
4. Sell-back
If a candidate is telling you what they think you want to hear, they’re selling themselves. So when you get a candidate to tell you what they like about the role, avoid questions that they may have scripted answers to.
5. The Client
Managing the client is absolutely key to minimizing the risk when a candidate has multiple processes in place. Make sure you tell your client that you’re a team and that you’re working together to secure a candidate irrespective of whether you want them in the end or not. WE need to make this candidate want your opportunity.
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