What to do when candidates want to wait to compare offers
If you stay in the recruiting game long enough, inevitably you’ll run into a scenario where a candidate you are representing gets to offer stage with your client, but wants to wait to see what the other companies they are interviewing with are prepared to offer before making their final decision. If you’re working with pragmatic decision makers, which software engineers (who I most recruit for) tend to be, this can be a difficult thing to content with, especially in a market like we’re seeing in 2021 with multiple offers being made to candidates with higher-than-normal comp plans.
What can you do to guard against this?
Unfortunately, not much. In the recruiting game, you can’t will a desired outcome by applying brute force - in fact, most candidates will be immediately turned off if they feel you’re trying to “sell” them a job. Not only that, but if they’re any good, which I suspect they are (else why would your client want to hire them?), they’ll be savvy enough to know at least a little about dealmaking, leverage, and how to play you, your client, and everyone else to get THEIR desired outcome: the best possible opportunity for themselves. And who can blame them? They absolutely should be doing that.
The good news is that there are techniques at your disposal to use as you try to navigate your way through this. Here are just a few:
The “buy it now” option
I modeled this one off of the iconic button on any eBay product auction listing. Most sellers, when they list a product on eBay for auction, have an idea of what they think the product is worth to them. eBay gives them the ability to offer shoppers a fixed fee to bypass the auction and purchase the product now, ensuring they get it without the hassle (and risk of not getting the product) of participating in the auction process. Usually the “buy it now” price will be at a premium, because the seller has to factor in the potential losses they could incur by bypassing the auction (especially if an item has shown to be historically popular.) When sellers factor their “buy it now” price, they take all of that into account, and you can use the same strategy for your candidate.
Here’s an example: Mike is a successful software engineer in Seattle. He is currently making around $200k/year and knows he can get at least $250k in the current market. He lines up multiple interviews with companies, one of which a recruiter, Sarah, is representing him for with her client.
Mike is smart and knows that he can leverage the multiple opportunities against each other to drive up his value, no different than if he was selling his house. But Sarah is smart, too, and she doesn’t want her client to miss out on Mike, nor does she want to miss out on her $30k+ fee!
Sarah sets an expectation with her client that if they want Mike, they’re going to have to pay - probably more than they expected. On the other side of the coin, Sarah lets Mike know that her client will be prepared to “lock him down” in order to secure his employment, meaning, they’ll make their best offer and give him a limited amount of time to make his decision. This, in essence, flips the leverage back to the employer - they can make Mike a one-time, ALL-IN, take-it-or-leave it deal and set a timeline to force his hand. Or, if they prefer, they can make him a “market-rate” offer and risk having Mike leverage that offer against them to better his positioning with other potential employers, reducing them to a pawn in Mike’s game.
Which approach do you think Sarah prefers?
If she plays it right, she just might be able to convince her client to offer a “buy it now” deal for Mike, and if the offer is good enough, Mike may just decide to fold his hand.
Note: even if Mike accepts the “buy now” deal, he may still elect to interview with and seek offers from the other companies. There’s nothing Sarah can do about this, and it does happen from time to time.
The “we’ll wait” approach
This is as simple as it sounds. Some companies prefer not to play hardball and try to push an outcome, they’d rather give the candidate the time they need to make the decision that’s right for them. Sort of the job search equivalent of the romantic partner who is okay with you “playing the field” before they ask you to make any long term commitments.
The benefit for the employer is that it demonstrates to the candidate that they are compassionate, understanding, and patient. A positive reflection of their work culture. Who wouldn’t want to work for a company anyone would describe using those adjectives?
The risk, of course, is that the candidate will get swallowed up by market forces beyond anything they can control. Meaning, other, more aggressive companies will get their hooks into the candidate and steer them away from the patient, understanding employer standing there, waiting on the sidelines, and soon to be left in the dust.
This approach can work, but I’d say your chances of success her are 20% at best. Too many factors out of your control.
Playing God
WARNING: use at your own discretion!
This approach should only be used be experienced, sophisticated recruiters, as it requires a degree of finagling and negotiating and comes with the risk of jeopardizing your professional relationships.
This technique allows the recruiter to play “puppet master” by leveraging their client’s interest in the candidate to build up intrigue such that the candidate becomes increasingly enamored with their client’s forthcoming offer. The classic mantra “people want what they can’t have” couldn’t be more true, so why not use that basic piece of human psychology to your advantage as a recruiter?
Here’s how Sarah does it: as soon as she knows her client wants to hire Mike, she buys herself time by telling the client that Mike has multiple potential deals in front of him, and she needs to give him the time to get other offers FIRST so her client can make a more competitive offer once Mike has already seen what is out there.
The basic thesis is that Mike will be more inclined to entertain Sarah’s clients offer because, A) it didn’t come easily, B) he had to wait for it, and C) he’ll have already leveraged everything else to get it. The hope here is that Mike’s interest in Sarah’s client will have grown exponentially because it wasn’t just handed to him, he had to earn it, as it were.
The danger, of course, is that Sarah’s client could get frustrated with the waiting game, or Mike could get frustrated waiting, and the whole thing goes belly up, in which case Sarah will be left with egg on her face.
If you’d prefer to take a more organic approach to making offers on behalf of your clients, you can just make as many offers as you can as quickly as you can, and hope you convert enough to make it worthwhile, knowing full-well that many of those offers will NOT be accepted.
If you decide to go that route with your recruiting business, you better make sure you have A LOT of activity (job orders, candidate submissions, interviews) because you’re really just playing chance.
Better to do at least a little leg work to try and ensure you convert the highest number of offers to ACCEPTED offers, which is really the only thing that matter in this game.
Happy Hunting.
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