How to never lose a good candidate?

Probably 80% of recruiters start their talk with ‘we are looking for……’. Sadly, these are the ones who probably won’t even state their name properly or allow the candidate to get comfortable (show some respect) etc etc. But then there does not seem to be any one formula to ensure that you have grabbed the candidate’s attention fully, even if they continue to be on phone with you.

One of the best practice that we have been training our users (Callify users) on how to record your introduction and job overview impactfully, may have some answers.

Funnily the solution is a hack on the one used by Sales professionals. We have tweaked it to suit the recruitment domain. Answer the below three questions in your mind (better yet prepare your answers upfront for every new job requirement). They are:

Why should the candidate care? 

In sales, the ‘why should you care’ comes from stating and highlighting a grave consequence (fear psychosis) if the prospect does not think of addressing his/her current problem immediately. For recruitment, it may be building a sense of urgency in the mind of the candidate on why he/she should be listening to you. Something like “We were about hire one candidate until I saw your profile and I said let me check with you first so I won’t regret that I did not call you”. 

What’s in it for the candidate?

Once you have grabbed someone’s attention via your ‘ why should you care’ pitch, your immediate next step should be to highlight what’s the benefit of listening to you. In sales that are typically stating the value proposition; something like, “With our solution, we are quite confident we would be able to double your revenue with the same cost of operations”. For recruiters it could be; “In this role, you will be able to interact with our teams in New York and contribute in the designing of the application or In this role, you will have direct visibility to our leadership team, especially CTO”.

Why this candidate?

This one is a bit of a flip. Instead of blabbering about your company, we are proposing you praise the candidate. Why this works?…is again based on a simple negotiation best practice (chances of you getting a win-win negotiation is not by using the negative opening; like- “well your product is not completely meeting our requirements, so I am willing to pay only 40% lesser”), but by using the positive opening (like- “honestly we like your product, I believe we will be able to achieve our goals with your help; unfortunately we do not have this much budget currently. I wish it was 30-40% lower”. So, for recruiters to use this, one could use this line of thought – “You have such strong experience and expertise, I am quite sure my hiring manager will be happy to meet you. I believe you will be able to get along well with the hiring manager and accomplish great things here”.

While recruiters might debate that not every candidate they speak to is a rockstar or catwoman…but as a practice if you use the above technique irrespective of what type of candidate you are speaking to; you will almost never miss a good candidate because of what and how you spoke!