Convincing Top Candidates to Agree To an Interview

My experience and research has found that as much as 50% of the reasons that top candidates refuse to consider firms' job opportunities are directly related to the design of the recruiting strategy and the hiring process itself. Any combination of weak employment branding, negative comments found on the Internet, neutral or negative comments by current employees, a weak corporate jobs website, requiring multiple interviews, and a slow hiring decision will scare away up to 50% of the most qualified candidates.

To improve your candidate flow, you have to improve your employment branding and interviewing approach. If you're one of those individuals who is constantly complaining about the shortage of qualified candidates, maybe it's time to look in the mirror and realise that it is actually your approach to employment branding, recruiting, and interviewing that is causing your shortage.

Some best practice approaches for improving a top candidate's willingness to accept an interview include: 

• Build your external image. Having a powerful employment brand (external image) will overcome most of the "sins" that you make in the design and execution of the hiring process (Google, for example, has a notoriously slow hiring process, but because of its powerful employment brand, it still gets a flood of quality applications). Your Internet employment brand is especially important because top performers will invariably conduct online research to find out if your firm is a top place to work. 

• Offer a small reward. Offering a small reward for qualified individuals who complete the interview (e.g., a coffee card, product discount, free movie tickets, drawing for a glamorous trip, etc.) has a way of getting people's attention. Yes, you'll get a few turkeys, but all recruiting processes attract a percentage that are only semi-interested.

Change the location where you interview.

Changing where interviews take place can have a dramatic impact on improving both the volume and the quality of your candidates. Some tips include:

• Conduct online interviews. With the proliferation of online communications options, it's much easier for candidates to find a place where they can conduct a live Internet interview. In addition, online interviews significantly reduce travel costs for candidates outside of your region or country. Even teleconference phone interviews may be appropriate for the initial interview. 

• Hold interviews at local professional meetings. Almost every large city has a significant number of monthly meetings held by the local chapters of various functional professional associations. If you hold your interviews right before or after these events, you will increase the number of individuals who can easily make themselves available. Incidentally, you are also likely to improve the quality of the candidates because the very best practitioners periodically attend these monthly meetings in order to improve themselves. And, because these are professional events, you give the potential candidate an honest excuse for where they were if they need to explain it to others. In order to protect the candidate, you also have to make sure that the people being interviewed are not seen entering the interview area by other meeting attendees. 

• Hold the interview close to where they live and work. Moving the interview location to a more convenient spot in a big city can also be helpful. Alternately, if your business is located in a smaller city or rural area, holding "satellite interviews" in major cities can increase the number of willing interviewees by 50%. In cities where most professionals live in the suburbs, consider holding at least the preliminary interviews at a suburban hotel or mall. Yes, it's a little inconvenient for the managers (although they might live in the suburbs also), but you'll get much better attendance from employed people.  

• Meet at major conferences. If a large number of your candidates are from outside the region or the country, you can reduce the number of uninterested responders by interviewing at places where a large number of target candidates are likely to be anyway. Common rendezvous events include national association meetings, industry trade fairs, certification classes, university alumni events, and seminars. Because these events are generally held in a destination city, attendees have fewer family activities that conflict and, thus, more free time to talk before and after the formal event sessions end. Not only do top performers tend to be the ones who attend these events, but the setting itself is more informal, so it lends itself to less stressful interviews.

Change the time that you offer interviews.

Because the best candidates are currently working, it's very difficult for them to get off of work. This often involves lying to their current bosses or using sick or vacation time. So, in addition to changing the place of the interview, also consider changing the time of the interview to make it more convenient.

• Interview at night. Currently, employed people have more time after work and they don't need to fib about where they are. Often at night, candidates have more childcare options, so there is less pressure to interview quickly. In addition, hiring managers obviously have fewer meetings and business conflicts, which means that interviews can be scheduled more easily and quickly. Night sessions tend to be more informal and they are less likely to be interrupted by phone calls and urgent business interruptions. Yes, there's an obvious issue about asking managers and interviewers to stay late, but that inconvenience needs to outweigh the fact that you will both get more currently employed people to interview and you can ensure that the process won't stretch out over many weeks. You can alleviate some of the resistance by scheduling well in advance with one or two interview nights per month, while also letting them take the next morning off.  

• Interview on weekends. In addition to interviewing at night, you should also consider holding them on weekends. This is especially beneficial when a large number of your candidates are coming in from out of town On weekends, obviously candidates are more available, have more childcare options, and for the currently employed, there's no need to fib or take sick time to come to an interview. Offering an interview on a Saturday once a month during heavy hiring periods sends a message that you really care about applicants and their needs. Another variation includes offering interviewing options on minor holidays. 

• Interview on Friday. Everyone knows that hiring is frequently stretched out over long periods of time (which can mean a loss of top-quality candidates) because managers are too busy to interview. Some firms have set aside a designated time each week or month for interviewing. This problem can be partially alleviated by setting aside a designated time during each week when no meetings can be scheduled and all managers and interviewers must be available for interviews. I recommend a Monday or a Friday once or twice a month. It might seem harsh at first, but once managers get used to it, it speeds up the hiring process tremendously.

 Make the Interview Process More Candidate Friendly.

There are elements in most interview processes that serve to discourage many highly desirable candidates from participating. Some process changes that you should consider include: 

• Limit interviews to one day. One of the aspects of interviewing that frustrates candidates the most is the multiple callbacks for second, third, and even fourth rounds of interviews. Several health care facilities that I work with have instituted a one-day rule that allows managers to interview as many times as they want as long as all interviews are completed on the same day. This practice is common for visiting college candidates and also works for experienced hires. It forces managers to be more decisive, but it also demonstrates to candidates that your organization is considerate of their availability and that the firm has the ability to act quickly. 

• Reduce the number of interviews. There is little evidence that multiple interviews add much to the quality of the selection decision (although it can help increase employee buy-in of the candidate). If you can't limit the number of interviews to a single day, at least limit "death-by-interview" by reducing the total number of in-office interviews to as few as one but no more than three.  

• Include a sales segment. Before you begin the interview, make sure you've allocated enough time during it to sell the candidate on the job. If you happen to know his or her job acceptance criteria in advance (just ask), it's relatively easy to put together a sales pitch demonstrating how "this" job and your company meets each of his or her decision criteria.  

• Ask them who they want to talk to. For some reason, companies forget that they might not put everyone on the interview list that the candidate needs to talk to in order to understand the job and the company. I recommend that you ask finalists (for key positions) prior to coming in for a final interview specifically who they need to talk to and what information they need in order to make their decision on whether to accept this job.  

• Make interview scheduling easy. Hiring takes a long time primarily because of the difficulty in scheduling interviews (as a result of the busy schedules of both top candidates and hiring managers). You can eliminate the number of callbacks and the inevitable phone tag to find compatible times for interviews if you develop a Web-based scheduling system. These systems allow candidates to select and schedule their own interview times online, based on the open slots that managers make available.

Final Thoughts

I, for one, am tired of hearing corporate recruiters and hiring managers incessantly blaming everyone on the planet except themselves for their shortages of qualified candidates. The reality is that these formerly-abundant candidates were not killed in a massive plague nor have they all retired. What has really happened is that the improved economy has increased the competition for the exact same number of candidates. And, incidentally, if your organisation has a true global recruiting capability, the reality is that there are now significantly more available candidates (when you add the global talent pool to the U.S. talent pool).

The fact is that talent shortages for any single firm are caused by weak branding/recruiting strategies and practices. Just like going to a high school prom, the most attractive people have no trouble getting dates, while the poorly networked, slow, and unattractive individuals struggle. So, stop the whining and instead first improve the way that your corporation looks to outsiders; then, make the hiring process as customer friendly as your sales process invariably is. And, if you have to pay a few bucks in order to interview enough quality candidates, welcome to the new reality of recruiting. It's really that simple.

[Source: ERE Daily article by Dr John Sullivan, February 4, 2008]