Hands On - Business Edge
Time Kills All Deals
by Daniel Abramson

Are you losing good candidates because your hiring process takes too long? No matter what the statistics may say at any given moment, executives and managers live in a competitive jungle when it comes to attracting the best talent.

So, not only are you competing against other potential employers for these candidates, you are also competing against their tendency to stay put as stress levels increase.

Candidates are faced with the same decision-making dilemmas that confront you as a working manager or executive. Just like you, they are forced to make their decisions with somewhat incomplete information.

There is never enough time during the series of interviews to come to a conclusion with complete certainty that, if the decision is made to make the move, everything will work out for the best.

GUT DECISIONS

With incomplete information, candidates tend to make their decisions symbolically rather than logically, emotionally rather than rationally. When this symbolic decision-making process works to your advantage and you "land" the person you want, it forges the emotional bond between you and your new employee.

But, it also means that the hiring process itself and how it makes the candidate feel becomes at least as important as what is said along the way. And, if the words are right but the process feels wrong, the candidate will almost invariably withdraw from the running or turn your offer down.

CLOCK IT

There are many things you can do to make your hiring process more competitive. When the hiring process takes an inordinate amount of time, the best candidates you are interviewing will quickly conclude either or both of the following:

• That you are not that interested in them.
• That you're not decisive enough to represent the kind of company where they want to work.

Whatever they conclude, these are effective candidates with strong skills and notable accomplishments. Even if they have small egos, these people are busy and have other options. The fact that your interviews seem to have gone well will reinforce their confidence about their marketability. This new sense of confidence will radiate back into their own work environments, and some managers with the authority to do something about it will sit up and take notice.

Headhunters will call with other opportunities, or some relatives or business associates will refer them to another company. Having concluded that you are probably no longer interested in them, these candidates will rapidly lose interest in your opportunity. With the passage of just a little more time, something definitive will happen. Either they will get promoted, take another job, or decide to take themselves off the market.

In order to make your hiring process work in a highly competitive market, you need to make sure that it is effective, expedient, and decisive.

This is not to say that you should skip important hiring steps in order to achieve these time frames. Rather, your challenge is to compress the amount of time it takes to get those steps completed.

If your company is like most, you'll probably find that your hiring process has not been formally defined. Your first challenge will be to convince your peers that it ought to be. Once you've identified the major hiring steps, it's usually a relatively easy matter to reorganize the flow and sequence of the key events and schedule the involvement of those conducting the interviews to stream line your hiring process. Remember...time kills all deals!

Daniel Abramson, president of Staffdynamics, is a speaker at the Business Edge program, held in conjunction with the International Vision Expos. For more information, visit www.visionexpo.com.