Good Candidates Don't Get Better With Age

This blog posting is not about age discrimination in the executive recruiting process. Instead, it focuses on the risks organizations take in not moving swiftly on hiring candidates they want.

This scenario has happened to me often.  In the course of presenting a quality slate of executive candidates, everyone participating in the candidate review meeting is happy with the slate and ready to move into the interviewing process.  Smart organizations move quickly and systematically through the process, identify a primary and back-up candidate, extend an offer, and more often than not, hire the candidate they want. Other clients, unfortunately, have allowed the slate to sit idle for any number of reasons (few of them valid).  The thinking in those organizations is that the slate of candidates is conveniently parked and ready to be processed at the organization's convenience.  They assume that every candidate is fortunate to be in the slate and will hold their breath until the organization is ready to take the next steps.  This is a problem looking for a place to happen.

From the recruiter's vantage point the slate is primed and ready to be interviewed.  A key role of the recruiter is to keep all candidates interested and informed as the process moves toward a conclusion.  To arrive at 3 to 5 top notch candidates, the search firm will have sourced and worked through a pool of a hundred or more potential candidates, interviewing at least twice as many as they ultimately submit for interviews.  Each candidate has been sold on the attractiveness of the opportunity and the organization.  By then they will have done their homework about the organization.  They tend to be decisive individuals and expect the organizations they would join to be the same, especially considering that a search firm has been retained to find them. They assume there is a sense of urgency about filling the position.

There are several manifestations of organizational delays:  One is that the organization stalls for weeks before scheduling interviews.  Another is that the organization conducts interviews, but they are weeks apart.  Yet another is that the organization has completed interviews but has not provided any meaningful feedback to the recruiter (or the candidates) and everything has stalled.  In almost every case communication with the recruiter has dropped to a trickle.  It becomes very difficult in these situations for the recruiter to continue to positively represent the client.  Instead, communciation with candidates becomes a series of excuses.  The initial enthusiasm expressed by the candidates rapidly begins to fade.

In the search process, passive candidates are targeted and the recruiter has convinced them to consider their client's opportunity. More often than not the candidate is happy in place and not looking for a new job when contacted by the recruiter.  Few organizations realize that executive recruiters have two significant roles, not one.  Organizations think of recruiters as primarily candidate sourcers and qualifiers.  They often miss the point that the other half of the recruiter equation is selling the candidate on the opportunity, and once sold, they expect to have the hiring process move to a conclusion in a timely manner.

The biggest risk in delays--for any reason--is this:  Often, the passive candidate will have kept recruiters at bay prior to having their interest piqued with a particular opportunity.  They then draw this conclusion:  "As long as I'm considering XYZ's opportunity I might as well keep an open mind about other opportunities as well."  They begin to take every recruiter's call and start to consider other options.  This portends disaster for the hiring organization.  Good candidates don't get better with age.  It has to be assumed that if a good candidate is considering your opportunity, other opportunities are being considered as well.  It is a sad day when the hiring organization reenergizes their process only to hear from the recruiter that the candidate they were most interested in has taken another opportunity (or worse, has withdrawn from the process due to frustration with the hiring organization).  When either of these situations occurs, it is hard for the recruiter to continue to source, qualify and sell candidates on a career opportunity when the hiring organization is lackadaisical about moving the process along in a timely manner.

Solutions to this problem are obvious, but one of the best that applies is to practice the Golden Rule:  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  If an organization does that, then everything should work out fine for everybody. http://www.esiassoc.com/     http://www.michaelkburroughs.com/