I know how disappointing it may be when you get to the offer stage with your candidate and they decline. You may have worked with this candidate for up to a month or sometimes even longer and then they decide not to accept this job offer or accept another one.
While it’s not possible to always prevent candidates from dropping out it is possible to prevent this most of the times.
I personally had numerous cases when candidates decided not to pursue a job offer, but after analyzing what was wrong I understood that it has to do with the whole interviewing process. You must ask the right questions from the point you contact them and up to the point of the job offer. And those questions should be repeated at every stage. More on this is explained in our other article How To Arrange A Successful Interview For Your Candidate
Questions for the Candidate
Once you are at the job offer stage it is as equally important to ask the right questions in order to create a sense of certainty for the candidate regarding your job offer. Here’s a list of questions that will help you get the necessary information from the candidate and understand how serious they are about your job offer.
- What are the top 3 things do you like the most about this job?
- Is there anything that you don’t like about it? If they answer yes to this one make sure to tell them that you will address their concerns with the Client and get back to them.
- Do you have any other job offers at the moment? If they answer yes, ask them for details. Find out what the company is, what’s the position, how much are they being offered, etc.
- Are you ready to join this project? If they answer no, you should ask what is preventing them and depending on their answer address the issues accordingly.
- Are you available to start in 2 weeks?
- Is there anything that might prevent you from taking the offer? This question is similar to the 2 and 4, but targets the same thing from a different angle. By rephrasing you’ll get more information from them.
Setting a time frame
After you’ve gathered all the necessary information and you’re certain that the candidate will take the offer you have to set certain time-frames so the candidate doesn’t feel like they will always have this offer available. If they’re serious about the job offer, they’ll have no problem signing it, otherwise, they will be postponing the decision and you will end up looking bad in front of your Client. Also, you might lose other candidates that you might have in the pipeline.
A typical time frame for consideration should be no longer than 2 days.
This is a general guideline that will help you during the job offer stage. As usual, there are peculiarities involved on which we will expand in our future posts.
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