Hire With Your Head, 4th Edition

Chapter 13Start the Recruiting Process with a Career Discussion, Not a Sales Pitch

• Conduct Career Discovery on Your First Call
  • First, Put Only Semifinalists on the Bus
  • Only Ask “Yes” Questions and Don't Take “No” for an Answer
  • Overcome Preliminary Objections and Concerns
  • How to Answer the “What's a Career Move?” Question
  • Review the Person's Profile Before Describing the Job
  • Build a 10-Minute Relationship by Controlling the Conversation
• Recruiting Is Getting the Candidate to Sell You, Not You Selling the Candidate
  • How to Handle Compensation by Not Discussing It Too Soon
  • Gain Concessions to Negotiate the Offer as a Series of Steps
• Summary

Chapter 2 introduced the Performance-based Hiring process and mentioned that recruiting a top-tier person needs to be conducted in parallel with the assessment process, rather than afterwards. The idea here is that by waiting until the end of the interview to decide if you like the person, it's often too late, since the candidate will likely feel disrespected or slighted. This is truer if the interviewer is unprofessional or unprepared.

A similar situation exists when it comes to sourcing and recruiting. Now that you're starting to reach out to semifinalists and getting responses, it's necessary to immediately convert these names into serious prospects or into nodes to get additional referrals. This is why sourcing and recruiting needs to be a tightly integrated process rather than considered separate functions.

This is especially important ...