How to get job candidates to accept an offer

This episode ended up being a brainstorming exercise on how Tyler can increase the acceptance rate of his job offers at Less Annoying CRM. 

Takeaways include:

• Survey candidates after they either accept or reject to learn more
  • When someone says no, ask why they're saying no. 
  • That might lead to some really quick problems you could solve.
  • Look at this from two lenses:
    • Controllable rejections - there’s a way you could’ve changed this outcome. 
    • Uncontrollable rejections - there's no way you could've changed it. 
  • Even if it's uncontrollable, that doesn't mean there's no action you could've taken.
    • You probably could have figured this out earlier in the interview process, and just stopped interviewing them because they were never going to accept anyway. 
• Understand why people accept your offer
  • This can lead to some of the best insights on the value propositions that you need to focus on more with future candidates.
• Highlight your differentiation throughout the interview process
  • Make sure your candidates understand why your workplace is unique and special
  • You can do this at every touchpoint
• When you make an offer, show them your excited
  • Make a personal call or send a personal note
  • Have other people at the company reach out after we give an offer to encourage them to accept
  • Don’t be afraid to share your excitement with emotion
• Try making the offer in-person
  • You could have them come into the office for a final meeting
  • Or you could go to them
• Invite questions and concerns before a final decision
  • Offer to go out and meet them and talk about stuff after the offer.
• Consider whether your acceptance rate is good enough
  • Maybe it would be better to focus on more applicants instead of increase the conversion rate
• Make the written offer special 
  • Make the offer letter personal
  • Sell the role and company instead of just explaining what the offer is. 
  • Answer the key questions about total compensation and benefits
• Before you make an offer, find out where the candidates stands
  • Before you stop the final interview and move to offer mode, spend some time with the candidate and try to pull concerns out, pull anxieties out, pull out what might make them say no. Then address the issues before you make an offer.
  • Question examples:
    • “If you're not working here five years from now, what's the most likely reason why?”
    • “If you were to decline our offer, what would be the most likely reason
• When you are the employer, there’s a power imbalance
  • Keep this power imbalance in mind to avoid false signals and to make sure your candidate is comfortable

Introduction

Tyler: The topic for today is basically flipping interview advice on its head, and saying normally it's assuming that the company is in the driver's seat and has all the power. What I want to talk about today is after you get to the point where you know you want someone, well or before that point, but what can you do to really maximize the odds of someone actually accepting one of these offers. We have a coding fellow, which is where we teach people to code, we have two different internships, and we have a full time position we're recruiting for right now. It really, really sucks when you find the perfect person, you give them the offer, and they decline. I just want to avoid that if I can.

Rick: Yeah. Well, before the show I asked you I think what your acceptance rate was currently, can you share that?

Tyler: Yeah, this is kind of back of the napkin because we don't have a real applicant tracking system for this, but I would guess it's about 75% probably say yes, and 25% decline, would be my guess. More people decline earlier, but I'd say if we give an offer, some people bow out of the process before this, but if we give an offer, I'd say we have about 75%.

Rick: Cool. It sounds like what you want to focus on is how to increase that 75% up to a higher rate.

Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there's other benefits to this too. It's sort of like the way a good sales process for a company is going to lead to better customer retention also. This is the first impression for a recruit, and we want to build momentum that carries all the way through to after they start.

Rick: Okay. All right. Well, I guess, what would be success for this conversation?

Tyler: Yeah, I mean, what I'm looking for, I think, I mean ultimately the vague version of this is I just want to get people to actually say yes when I give them job offers. Specifically, I think I'd love a couple tangible takeaways or, not even... just ideas. I feel this is like a brainstorming thing where it's like maybe we can come up with five or ten things I can try, and maybe I'll actually actually try three of them, and one of them will work. But things I can actually do to just do more than whatever I'm doing now, which might be, in some ways, the bare minimum to get people to say yes.

How the interview and offer process works currently

Rick: Well can you talk about what you're doing now?

Tyler: Yeah. I'm inclined to break this into two categories. One is what's the whole interview process? Because that's leaving an impression on the person, and then there's the actual offer itself. I'm probably really bad at the offer itself. That's probably like the low hanging fruit here. But I'm happy to start at the beginning if you think that'd be helpful.

Rick: Totally up to you. We can dive in right to the offer, how you're positioning that, or you could add context about how you're going about this.

Tyler: Okay. Let me add a little context, but let's start by talking about the offer just because I think there's the most opportunity to improve there. We go and recruit mostly at schools, but sometimes through LinkedIn, or whatever other channel. The general process, it depends on the job, but it's something like a phone screen followed by, well sorry, they apply with a writing sample and a resume, we do a phone screen, then we bring them in for an in-person. The in-person interview is pretty long. And one of the reasons for that is it's like half us interviewing them, but half us trying to show them they would like it here. Which is easy for college students. With an adult, it's a little harder. Everyone wants different things. College students don't have a very refined idea of what they want. We play a board game with them, and give them free food, and they're like, "Oh great." But it's about a four-ish hour in-person with about half of that being us trying to make them think it's a cool place to work. Normally there's maybe let's say a week, or two, or three where we're finishing all those in-person interviews and we give the offer. What we do for that right now is I call them up. One thing I'm interested in your thoughts on is should it be me, should it be the person's direct manager calling them, but I call them up. No one ever picks up their phone, so the options are leave a voicemail, a vague voicemail that's like call me back or just give them the offer in the voicemail. I've dabbled with both. Right now I'm of the opinio...