By Daniel Abramson
Move with calculated timing to hire the best workforce for your practice. Your most promising job candidates will be lured away by your competitors if you let them languish, or if you speed carelessly through the process.
One of the worst mistakes you can make as a hiring manager is to let your hiring process take too long from the first interview to the offer decision, as time kills all deals. The current economy makes it an employer’s job market, but hiring managers live in a competitive jungle when it comes to attracting and hiring the best candidates.
Candidates’ Decisions Not Logical
1 Competition. Other potential employers who also want to hire them.
2. Staying put. As candidate stress levels increase, they tend to hunker down and stay where they are.
Candidates are faced with the same decision-making dilemmas you face as they go through the hiring process. Like you, they are required to make their decisions with incomplete information and a cloudy crystal ball. As a result, they tend to make their decisions symbolically, rather than logically, and emotionally rather than rationally. They invariably judge your opportunity as much by how the hiring process makes them feel as by what you and your co-workers say to them.
Take Control of Time
While there are many things you can do to make your hiring process more competitive, the most pressing one is to take control of the amount of time it takes from your first interview with the candidate until the offer is made. For when a hiring process takes too much time to get to the offer step, the best candidates you are interviewing will quickly conclude:
1. That you’re really not that interested in them.
2. That you’re not decisive enough to represent the kind of company they want to work for.
Slow Hiring = Over-Confident Candidates
Whatever your new hire prospects conclude, they are effective candidates with strong hard and soft skills and notable accomplishments. Even if they have small egos, they are busy people who have other options. The fact that your interview process seems to have initially gone well will reinforce their confidence about their own marketability. This new sense of confidence will radiate back into their own work environments, and perceptive managers with the authority to do something about it will sit up and take notice. Headhunters will call with other opportunities, or some relative or business associate will refer them to another company. Because your lengthy hiring process is conveying the signal that you are no longer that interested in them, these candidates will rapidly lose interest in your opportunity, as well.
Associate OD
4-6 weeks
Office Manager
4 weeks
Optician or Pre-tester
2 weeks
Optician with Managerial Skills
1-2 weeks
Your challenge is to compress the amount of time it takes to get hiring completed. When you do so, you enhance your performance in this hyper-competitive employment market and avoid a major hiring blunder.
Daniel Abramson, CTS, is president of Staffdynamics, a workforce performance strategies firm. He is the author of Secrets of Hiring Top Talent. Contact: daniel@staffdynamics.biz.
