One change to improve your hiring process

All right, Good morning. I have hired hundreds of people, and today I want to tell you about a change I made that made the biggest impact in my hiring process. Let me start by just differentiating the steps of the process, because I think recruiting is different than interviewing is different than hiring. So recruiting is attracting people to your company and to your job. It's getting candidates into the interview process. And that's what I talked about two weeks ago. Kind of a mindset shift you could make to increase your candidate pool. Interviewing is actually bringing those candidates in and interviewing them and assessing them and aligning the needs of your company with the desires and talents of your candidates. And that's what I talked about last week. Hiring, then is when you have a candidate and you want to offer them a job. Now, there's plenty of nuances on how to do this well, but it comes down to a job offer. Ideally, the manager is the one making that job offer because they're the ones that the person is going to be working for. And that job offer is where expectations are being set, expectations of the new employee. Like, what are. What are their schedule, what are their responsibilities and their projects that they're going to be working on? And then for the employee, what are the expectations of the company? How is the team going to be managed, or what team are they going to be working with? What are the growth opportunities? And the tighter that conversation is about expectations, the less chance you have of misaligned expectations. Now, as head of recruiting, I made most of the job offers well, and the reason was because hiring managers, they didn't do it much, and so they weren't comfortable and it often didn't go well. So it was this compromise of the hiring manager being the best person to do the job offer, but not being as sophisticated or as experienced with it. And this one change I made can allow hiring managers to get more involved in the hiring process. Here's what I used to do. So I'd talk to the candidate after we've interviewed them and determined we do want to hire them, and I'd answer their questions and I'd say, well, hey, we really like you and we want you to join our team. So I'm going to make you an offer for a software developer position at this salary. And we'd like to start, like you to start in two weeks. I'd talk a little bit about the benefits, and then we'd negotiate a little bit, you know, you know, each of us from kind of a guarded position, trying to get the best terms, and we'd settle on those terms and close the deal. And I'll be honest, I didn't. I didn't love the process. I kind of felt anxious about the whole interaction, and it didn't really advance the relationship. What I mean is, I had done a lot of work to build this great candidate experience, kind of like I talked about last week. And the hiring process didn't seem to match that. So this change I made dramatically improved the process for me and I believe for the candidate as well. So adopting this idea is also going to allow hiring managers to get more involved in the process. What's the change? Well, I stopped presenting an offer and instead started discussing an offer. So I would paint a picture of what an offer might look like if we were to move forward. And I talked to the candidate as soon as I could when I knew we were probably going to move forward. So usually the hiring manager interview, they'd say, yeah, I really like them. I think I want to move forward with them. And really, at that point, we could start checking references. But I would have this offered discussion with the candidate, and I talk about what the job position typically is, what the responsibilities look like, what team they might be working with. I talk about what the onboarding process was and what kind of support they received when they worked with us. I talk about the career path and growth opportunities, and I talk about a salary range. And I'd say in general terms, this is kind of what offers in this range or for this position look like. Here's the range, here's what it looks like when they move up in two or three years, and here's that kind of range. And then we talk about start date and what typically people do, what the start date really looks like. Usually it's like two weeks. Maybe we can go to three weeks. And I'd give a general overview of the benefits. But I'd talk about it as if it was kind of a generic thing, maybe not so much about them. And that always opened up a discussion about what was important to them. It allowed us to talk about really sensitive things like salary openly and less defensively. Sometimes I would find that it was start date that was really important, or there was other needs they had and there were creative things we could do to address those needs. Sometimes we would find that we were thinking of the person as more of a junior candidate, and we were evaluating for those positions, and they really thought they were a senior candidate. And that allowed us to kind of open back up the interview process and bring them in maybe through some Additional interviews in a way that enhanced the candidate experience as opposed to being being a negative. If you want to see my cat this morning, there you are. We are live. Say hi to Talia. So that was the offer discussion. And once I felt like I could understand the candidates needs and wants and things were in alignment with what we wanted and what they wanted, then I could say, well here's what an offer is going to look like and is that something that you would accept? And only then when they said yeah, that sounds great, I would accept that. Then we would present a formal offer and really the hiring manager can take it all the way to that point and then turn it over to HR to make the formal offer and start the process. So that's the change I made. Stop presenting offers, start having offer discussions. Hiring is different than recruiting or interviewing. I consider it a separate step, but it is a critical part of the candidate experience. And if you want to have the best people working for you, you want to give it the same attention and consideration as the other parts of the process. So today's tip, start having offer discussions ahead of job offers. I think it'll put the candidates more at ease, I think it'll make it more pleasant for you and it'll improve the quality of the new hires that you bring into your organization. If you're a technical manager that has just started getting into hiring and you're delegating HR to make the job offers right now, talk to them and see how you could get more involved. Maybe you can do part of the offer discussion. I mean, it's only going to make HR's job easier and it improves rapport with the candidate. So I hope today's LinkedIn Live has been helpful. If you try this, please let me know how it goes. And as always, if you want to talk more about how you can build high performing management teams at your company, you can book a call with me. Simply go to shiftfocus.com strategycall and select a time that's convenient for you. Thanks and we will see you next week.