If you’re first to present a job offer, does that ensure you’ll snag the candidate?

I read a recent article posted by Matt Deutsch on PRWEB. Matt is the Chief Content Officer for Top Echelon, a recruiter job sharing network. He suggested in this article titled, Top Echelon Recruiter Survey: Why Candidates Turn Down Job Offers  , that the first company to make an offer will usually be the one who gets the candidate.  After 30 years of executive search, I’ve got to look at this comment as being wrong. It has nothing to do with candidate motivation or why people take jobs.

I’ll take a 180 degree different perspective on this blog post by Matt Deutsch – which is tough since we share a common last name.

Maybe desperate candidates who are long-term unemployed jump at the first job offer due to desperation. In 30 years of executive search, over 1000 search assignments, and interviews with over 250,000 candidates, I have NEVER believed that good candidates take jobs based on the order in which they are presented.

For most candidates, particularly top talent, the sequence of job offers – first, middle, or last – has nothing to do with the acceptance rate.

The real issues of whether good candidates take jobs is not different today than it was over half a century ago when Maslow published the “Hierarchy of Needs”. Top caliber candidates take jobs based on principles of self-actualization.

In our hiring methodology, we call this the LIB curve – what am I going to learn in this job, what impact will I have, and what will I become for having been in this job for a period of time. When hiring managers fail to address these specific issues, candidates decline or ignore their job offers.

Since most hiring managers and HR professionals do a TERRIBLE job of discussing the LIB factors in an interview, they typically struggle to hire the best talent. It’s the same issue for compensation, most top caliber candidates will sacrifice some portion of compensation if they feel the learning, impact, and becoming will put them on a steeper curve of success.

Recruiters don’t lose deals because their clients can’t move fast enough – which is the underlying message in this post by a recruiter network. Recruiters lose deals because they don’t know how to help their clients convey the value of a job offer beyond compensation. They lose their candidates to competitors who do a much better job of showing candidates the learning, impact, and becoming elements of a new job.

Peter Cappelli makes a convincing case for what hiring managers should do in terms of considering long-term unemployed candidates. He frames it with the need to demonstrate social responsibility.

I’ve been conducting executive search for almost 30 years. In that time I’ve worked on over 1,000 executive searches, and between my parrtners and myself, probably interviewed over 250,000 managerial and executive candidates.

The hiring manager perspective on long-term unemployed candidates has not changed much in those 30 years. Most hiring managers have a prejuidice against unemployed candidates – considering them “damaged goods”. The unstated thinking is that if they were any good, they wouldn’t be long-term unemployed – in fact, they wouldn’t be unemployed ever.

Perhaps this thinking is misguided and inappropriate. That’s not the issue. The real issue is that the perspective on long-term unemployed candidates is a tribal hiring element. For example, I learned to be biased from my boss, who learned a generation ago to be biased from their boss.

Until we break this tribal hiring paradigm of employed/unemployed candidates, NOTHING will change. One way to break the paradigm is to train hiring managers to be more objective and rational in their decision making process. Until training, coaching, guidance lowers, eliminates, or changes our long-term bias against unemployed candidates, there is no hope that the perspective will evolve through the next recession or the next 10 recessions.

What is your organization doing right now to help hiring managers learn how to assess, interview, and measure candidates from a rational and objective approach to overcome the bias of unemployed vs. employed?

Barry Deutsch