So you’ve gone through a rigorous process and made sure you’ve added to your knowledge about your candidate. You’ve made your decision and put a reasonable offer to your preferred choice of candidate. Now what? Do you sit back and wait for the notice period to end and for your candidate to turn up at the set time and date? Well you might, but what in reality happens between offer acceptance and start date for you, for the candidate and for the candidate’s current employer? Having these insights and knowing what to do about them to maximise your chances of the new employee actually starting will save you wasted effort and increase the chance of the new employee making the earliest possible impact in your business.
You have already incurred the cost of starting and managing the recruitment campaign. You have already incurred the costs of staging interviews and selection events so why not ensure you get your return from these activities? However, most of the next stage is not really in your control. Sitting and waiting might seem like the only option but to do that is folly.
Let’s first look at it from someone else’s point of view.
Your preferred candidate has put the effort in to apply, to research your business, to attend interview and selection events. Then they get the call, the email and the paper copy of your offer. After some negotiation they and you get to common ground and the candidate agrees a start date with you some point in the near future. Next the worrying and often traumatic step, the candidate is ready to hand in their notice.
Now what, what responses will their current employer have? You have to believe that the selection process you have run is testing but has also importantly identified a candidate who is great already, they might be even better in your business but nevertheless, great already, at least to someone! Now as an employer, your candidate’s current manager realises what an asset they have and will make some moves to retain their services – you’d do the same right? These efforts might cover a range of options including a better salary and more development, anything that might encourage your candidate to stay. After all, the whole recruitment exercise is not easy and who willingly wants to go through that!!
Importantly, this conversation and possible counter offer occurs at exactly the same time in the emotional journey of your candidate where they have a similar issue to that of buyer’s remorse. This ‘candidate remorse’ is an understandable and recognisable stage in any change but could, if not managed right, lead to the candidate agreeing to stay with their current employer, accepting the counter offer.
Clearly, these conversations about added salary, growth opportunities, and other reasons to stay should have been had before the ‘notice’ conversation but like lots of employers they get left. However, you are not in control of these so some aforethought is necessary to minimise the chances of you losing ‘your candidate’.
After you have agreed your offer, that’s not it. Sitting and waiting for your candidate to arrive at some agreed future time and date is not enough. So what can you do?
Firstly, continue the communication using a mix of media from written communication through email and also using phone calls. These should be from you and from other members of the team. You want your candidate to be making the emotional journey to be part of your team right from the offer agreement to the day of starting employment with you. These communications need to be consistent with the messages they have received right from the start, nothing in terms of language, tone and style should be inconsistent. Easy trick here is that if you’ve been telling the truth about you, your business, and what its like to work ‘here’, then this won’t be a problem. It’s only if you aren’t clear about these that issues can arise.
If the time from offer to start is longer than a couple of weeks then seriously think about trying to get your candidate to a team event, a briefing or a coffee meeting. Anything to get your candidate to still be motivated to join you rather than stay where they are.
The bottom line is that there is a huge percentage of employees who accept the counter offer only to have realised that the issues that made them want to leave in the first place have not gone away. The added salary, the growth or development opportunities or whatever else they were persuaded with, just haven’t been enough to gloss over the fundamental reasons for dissatisfaction, therefore the candidate often leaves a number of months later anyway. This is no consolation to you however. You went through the effort (and cost) of attracting and selecting them and now someone else has got the benefit and you’ve had to start again!
Take heed of the lessons and you will attract, select, offer and then ensure that the yes remains a yes!
