How to Not Hire

You read that right.

This is not a playbook rehashing the best practices for hiring candidates. It’s about the ones you decline.

We’ve heard all of the advice before:?If you want to hire the best talent, you have to pay attention to the little things. All of them. All of the moments, and nuances, and tasks, and interactions that comprise The Candidate Experience. It’s during the hiring process when your relationship with your new hire begins. It sets the tone.?It lays the foundation. It cultivates the first seedlings of trust.?

Getting it right can mean the difference between a committed, engaged long-term relationship and a short tenure flight risk. Get it right consistently and you find yourself carrying a legendary culture.

But what about the ones you don’t hire??The bridesmaid candidates? The silver medalists??The runners up?

I assert that how you not hire someone is just as important as how you do.

Think about it. You’ve won the heart (hopefully!) of the one person you hired.?Even in a poor candidate market, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of applicants that applied that you did not hire.?

It’s safe to assume that some of them are going to be understandably salty about not getting the job.?You can’t win them all. However, you can win some and contain the damage. Why not make the effort to ensure that the rest of your declined candidates are still madly in love with your company??Guarantee that they are a growing pool of people who have nothing but favorable things to say about your company? A community like that can dramatically elevate your brand and make your company a highly sought after employer.

Consider for a moment what can happen if your process has been ugly.?Those same scores of people are making noise. Telling everyone within whining distance just how bad their experiences were, and projecting that onto your company, doing damage that will be hard to undo.

They’ll tell their spouses when you’ve added one more interview and one more assessment and one more wad of red tape, extending what could be a two week process into a months long audition.?Their family will assert that your company is disorganized or doesn’t value their talent and suggest they keep looking.

They’ll tell their parents when you’ve ghosted them. Or when you’ve told them after three interviews that they are over qualified, or that you’re promoting from within.?Their parents will say that your company lacks direction and strong leadership, and that any self-respecting person would never consider working there.

When they meet an old friend for lunch, they’ll make a dark joke and open their phone to display the cold, impersonal, standardized rejection email they received shortly after the zoom interview where the interviewer had provided very positive feedback. The old friend will tell them that the recruiter is unprofessional and lazy and assert that they’ve “Dodged a bullet.”

They’ll mention it to the person who referred them when, after six interviews with nine people over four months, that you had a temporary recruiter who they’d never met, and who was in no position to offer meaningful feedback of any kind, call and decline them.?And the referring employee will be embarrassed and feel slighted. They’ll question why on Earth they trusted your company with their treasured friend in the first place. They will hesitate to refer another talented person for consideration again, and perhaps suggest other companies in their network.

They’ll ask people in their professional network how to handle the awkward silence.?What to do when the recruiter says “I’ll know more on Monday, and will be in touch then.”?And then Monday comes and goes, and so does Tuesday. And then it’s Friday afternoon again and they’re wondering if they should reach out once more and risk annoying the recruiter, or brace themselves for a rejection.?They’ll ask how to handle the interviewer who has offered to answer any further questions that might come up after the interview, and has provided his email and phone number, and then has ignored the carefully prepared, relevant questions posed when they took him up on the offer.

If they are feeling vengeful, they’ll go to the myriad sites that invite the public to opine on their experiences with companies with which they’ve interacted.?They’ll be brutal. They’ll hold nothing back. They may even embellish. Why not?

Each of these people who hear your candidate’s tale of woe will form an opinion about your company and what really goes on there. They’ll repeat what they’ve heard – to members of their families, their dentist, hair dresser, golf foursome, pickle ball partner, Lyft driver, babysitter, manicurist, book club…

Chances are the tales will become more colorful as they are whispered down the lane. We all know how that goes.

So what is the point of all this doom and gloom??Yes, it is important to get the candidate experience right with the person you hire. I won’t argue that. ?But in the numbers game, you have more to win (and to lose) in how you handle the people you don’t select for hire.

Why not wow them all? Every one of them. Make every effort to ensure that everyone you hire or turn away has only glowing things to share about their experiences with you. Better still, leave them hoping for another opportunity with you later.

Some pro tips:

·??????Have a tight process and stick to it.?Make sure all hiring managers know exactly what the process entails and what it does not.?(Don’t get me started on Brain Teaser questions.) Invest in training your hiring team on technique.?

·??????If, in the interest of time, you use standardized emails to communicate with candidates, make sure you have an arsenal of warmly written, encouraging templates that don’t take the tone of a dunning notice.

·??????If anyone in your company has spoken directly to the candidate, even once, a phone call should precede the rejection email.

·??????Be true to your word. If you tell the candidate you will follow up with them by a certain date or time, do it.?And if by some chance, you do not have the information you were hoping to share when that time has arrived, contact the candidate, apologize for the delay, and recalibrate their expectations. Further, if you tell the candidate that you are preparing an offer, be sure you have the authority to make good on that commitment, and that there is not some politically powerful person involved who will hold their breath and stomp their feet until everyone has agreed to hire a candidate they prefer instead.

·??????If you offer to respond to any follow up questions, and provide a way for the candidate to ask them, don’t let those questions go unanswered.

·??????And if you are lucky enough to have someone in your company trust you with a referral, that candidate should be treated with extra special attention.?Your relationship with the candidate and with the referring employee are both at stake.

Reputations and employer brands are slow to build and easy to destroy. Cultivate them. Nurture them. Protect them.?One bad actor can burn down a great company’s public image.?Hold everyone to a standard.?You would not keep an employee who was not treating your customers with kindness and respect and dignity.?View your candidates the same way you view your customers. Be very selective about in whose hands you place your candidate experience, and train, train, train like your company’s future depends upon it. It does.

#rejections #bestpractices #hiring #candidateexperience