Making a Standout Offer

We’ve now arrived at the 5th and final step in the contractor lifecycle management journey. We started with better understanding the scope of contractors in the organization and the most recent article covered how to find the “right” candidate to fit the role. Once your organization has identified the individual you’d like to hire, you’ll need to present an offer that’s compelling and competitive to ensure your organization secures the identified talent. This moves us to the final and critical step in the contractor management lifecycle, making the offer, something that an MSP like Workspend Inc. can help your organization create. Therefore, the topic of this piece is to better understand how to use GenerativeAI (GenAI) technology to facilitate making an offer to a candidate.

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Taking the Shot

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Similarly, your organization will miss out on candidates who could add value if you don’t make an offer. Some organizations, or teams within the company - skeptical of their chances to secure the talent they’re pursuing - decide not to make an offer to promising candidates. Perhaps their decision not to make an offer comes from their lack of confidence in the value and appeal of their organization to the candidate, versus the broader market (e.g. Big Tech Seven). Nevertheless, while things vacillate between hot and cold in any market, there is still a “talent war” in the current marketplace as much as there has been at any point in the past (e.g., during the Covid-19 pandemic). This is especially true today when it comes to talent working with GenAI. Candidates with GenAI experience, expertise, and credentials are in heavy demand within the market today. Nevertheless, your organization needs to remember the candidate has applied to work with you, whether of their own volition or through recruitment. Either way, there are likely multiple reasons why the candidate would like to pursue a career in your organization, else they could have simply not applied. Subsequently, your organization should ensure a compelling offer is made to candidates that you believe will be a good fit, even if you’re unlikely to secure this talent. However, the key to making a successful offer will be to leverage GenAI to make your offer stand out amongst the crowd. Let’s explore some of the ways to make your offer an outstanding one.

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Analyzing the Options

Robert Half, the founder of the eponymous global human resource consulting firm once said, “It's easy to make good decisions, when there are no bad options.” In creating an outstanding offer, it’s important to ensure the options provided are all excellent, thereby achieving the desired decision of the candidate picking your organization. When assembling an offer, it’s important to understand all aspects of an offer; it’s not all just about compensation, although obviously it’s likely to be the most critical part, and so the next section deals specifically with that aspect of the offer. Thankfully, GenAI tools like ChatGPT, are wonderful reference platforms to help when contemplating the other aspects of an offer. Specifically, platforms like Workspend’s WRAP take advantage of GenAI systems to help provide you with a reasonably exhaustive list of items to consider for an offer. There are obvious items like health insurance, retirement programs, and financial benefits (e.g. stock), which likely are relevant and important to all candidates. However, there are another set of factors one needs to consider that can be relevant and applicable as well. These can include critical lifestyle factors like setting (in-office, hybrid or fully remote), geographic location, relocation, employer services offered, family friendly benefits, or spousal support options (e.g. employment assistance). Any and all of these can make a substantial difference when candidates consider competing offers. It becomes a “total package” discussion, where none of the package options are “bad.” When creating an offer, this should be the goal of every hiring manager. Of course, as noted above, candidates will still likely look for competitive compensation - hitting that target will help make your offer a standout option - and we’ll tackle that next.

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Creating a Standout Offer

When considering the base compensation for a candidate, the more data and insights a hiring manager can acquire the more likely it will lead to a more competitive offer for a candidate. After all, as famed management guru W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” So, the more data one can acquire about market compensation for a role, the more that offer can stand out from competitors. Thankfully, acquiring this data and ensuring its usefulness and relevance for your role is something that Workspend’s WRAP platform does out-of-the-box. Leveraging GenAI technology, this platform utilizes data from a myriad of sources available in the market, and proprietary Zero Party data (aka 1st party data) to generate standard pay rates for roles. The roles are standardized using GenAI technology to create a homogenous data set comprised of aligned titles, so as to make the data comparable across repositories. In addition, this platform goes another step further by creating pay rates for roles based on local, regional, state, and national compensation. This enables an organization to compare their proposed compensation as compared to other players in every market, even nationally. The WRAP platform additionally analyzes what your organization pays, as compared to other sets of anonymized data. Thereby giving clients not just publicly available data and comparisons, but private data sources of roles, regions, and pay scales. Therefore, this approach provides the most robust data set available. Finally, the WRAP platform, again based on its proprietary data model, also highlights the compensation rate for the last few in-market hires for the role in question, thereby providing the best gauge available for the compensation necessary to make your offer an outstanding proposition for candidates.

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Organizations need to put their best foot forward when making an offer to a candidate, not only because this increases the chances a candidate will pick your organization, but also because of the positive momentum a solid offer creates in the market – as everyone talks. The first step in the process is to make an offer and not shy away due to internal constraints, preconditions, or misconceptions. Next, ensure the offer is comprehensive and includes all of the key “lifestyle” elements relevant to your target candidate. Finally, closing the deal with a candidate requires deep insights and knowledge of market rates, to ensure the shot you do take, ends up being the winning goal, which a platform like WRAP can effectively provide.

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Other articles in this series:

·?????? The Shadow Labor Force

·?????? Getting Ahead of the Curve

·?????? Attracting the Best and Brightest

·?????? Finding the Right Fit

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