Too Many Candidates Turning Down your job Offer? Tips on how to improve joining ratio

Let’s first make this realistic assumption-Compensation is still a major factor that attracts talent. If the money isn’t there, the best candidates will never accept your job offer. In an ideal world scenario companies will pay whatever employee wants but the world is not ideal and even employees aren't sure how much is their market worth, Last few months have seen a spurt in hiring across the companies after a lackluster 2017, With companies eyeing for "Top Talent" the demand of good techies have gone up. It's a war of Talent and all the progressive companies are making all the effort to hire and retain talent. Few experiences are more disappointing than having a top-choice job candidate decline your offer. But, too often, hiring managers’ expectations are out of sync with the job market. Candidates control the market, so they can afford to be selective. And if you’re not aware of how you measure up, you risk losing out.

You have finally made an offer to a rockstar candidate only to have them turn around and tell you that they are considering a couple of other offers. It’s certainly a challenging situation for a corporate recruiter and this step becomes most important, many corporate recruiters are proud that they are good at sourcing and interviewing, but the reality is that today there are many vendors and technologies that can do these two components of recruiting equally as well or even better. But with the third remaining component of recruiting, you are pretty much on your own when as corporate recruiter, you have to close an extremely hard-to-convince candidate who has multiple job choices.it is possible to turn it around in your favor and secure the person you want for your role – even if they do have other offers on the table.

Here are some tactics to help you close candidates who may be considering other offers. You’ll note that closing the right candidate starts well before you give them the offer.

1.  Job Acceptance Criteria: Most of the Top Candidates would rate Job Content, Challenging work environment, Chance to solve an unsolved problem, Quality of co-workers and off course money as the key criteria s they will consider before making a move, Asking top candidates for their “job acceptance, as well as their deal-breaker criteria, should be a standard part of the recruiting process but is especially important for in-demand candidates. For the best candidates, don’t be subtle. Ask them upfront before or during their first interview to list and rank the things they will need in order to accept a job. And then at the end, when you are outlining your final offer, be sure and go over each of the criteria. And after each factor, ask the candidate if they agree that it has been met in your job opportunity.

2.  Death by Interviews:“Death by interview” is the term used to describe the drawn out pain that job applicants suffer as a result of requiring an excessive number of interviews, repeating the same questions across multiple interviews. and the unnecessary uncertainty that is part of most interview processes. Google use to do double digit interviews and earned a dubious reputation of employer who will make candidate suffer , Fortunately, its well-earned death-by-interview reputation forced Google to eventually conduct internal research that demonstrated that “after four interviews, you get diminishing returns.” And since Google is interviewing for positions that require advanced skills and innovation, it’s time to realize that for most jobs, any number beyond three interviews is probably unnecessary. Obviously when the optimal number of interviews is exceeded, not only does the firm receive little additional value, but each of the candidates must suffer unnecessarily.All top candidates will surely not like to be interviewed multiple times, Convincing hiring managers and defining the process upfront will make the process agile and candidate friendly, Ultimately candidates will love to join a company which provide better candidate experience assuming compensation and other factors are at par with the competition.

3.  A C-Level Executive Call:  The most powerful convincing tool of all is a personalized one-on-one meeting or call with the CEO/CTO or other respected high-level executive in charge. This executive contact works in corporations because showing that the CEO is willing to take the time to talk to a finalist in a job makes it clear how important that candidate and this job are to the future of the firm. Most finalists also assume that having a relationship with the CEO at the very start will mean that if they accept, they will assuredly have complete access to the CEO, as well as their support and backing for all aspects of their work.

4.  Personalizing Candidate Experience – There is nothing more unnerving than feeling like you’re just a number. Personalize your interactions with the applicant; really get to know their story and make sure it is clear just how invested you are in the process. We are living in Amazon, Uber era wherein most of our shopping experiences are customized suiting our needs, Why not use the same fundamentals in the hiring process, Customize the process based on what candidates wants, Ask him/her how he/she wants to structure the interview discussions, Make him partner while you are designing a compensation package for candidate. Let the candidate come to office for a day and work with his colleagues, managers, peers to have a actual feel of how the work place is going to be. Adding a significant and unexpected “WOW surprise” that hadn’t even been discussed can make all the difference in closing the deal. Unexpected but pleasant surprises (Offering a designated parking space, customizing the benefits) in an offer can often seal the deal. Send your calendar to candidate and let candidate decide when he/she is free to take the discussion.Because adding something extra (when you didn’t need to) reveals to the finalist that you’re willing to go above and beyond This will have an huge impact on candidate and also will improve the fairness quotient of the organization.

5.  Make them feel they already belong to your company: Isn’t it great to feel like you belong to a group? This is precisely true to candidates as well, even if they’re not hired yet. Make it a point to connect a candidate with a current employee – ideally on the team they’d be working on – so candidates can ask more specific questions about the company, team and role. Also while you are conversing with candidate make sure you make him visualize how good it is working in your organization.Structure your conversation and put an emphasis on working in "our" organization so that there is sense of belonging while candidate is still contemplating other Opportunities.

6. Make Counter Job Offers - Some of my peer group in HR might have a disconnect with this but to stay competitive you have to be aggressive, It is given that when candidate is out in job market he/she will look at multiple opportunities and will like to settle at nothing but the best. So be aggressive in giving counter offers, This is not a debate of being ethical, Please ponder on some of the purchases you made while buying an item , You go to various sites, compare prices and buy from the site which offers most competitive deal, So Snap the deal with candidates by making counter offers(BTW: I buy from Amazon and not from Snapdeal)

Unlike corporate sales, corporate recruiting functions don't have a formal process for assessing and continually improving their job offers. This makes little sense because all of the time, effort, and money that have already been invested in recruiting a top candidate becomes a complete waste if the top finalist don’t actually say yes. Recruiting Function should have a formal process of "Gap Analysis" whenever a star candidate turns down the Offer,There should be a continues process to evaluate what is working and what is not working, Often on corporate recruiting function there are set boundaries for recruiters to operate upon be it compensation benchmarks or salary structures and benefits. This needs a relook in case your organization wants to hire rockstar candidates.