Please forgive any typo’s or grammatical errors this is a direct transcript of the video.
Hello. I’m Matthew Finch from BTG Recruitment. I’m known as the go-to guy for accountancy and finance recruitment in the East Midlands. Today, we’re going to be talking about how we can prevent issues when it comes to making a job offer and potentially our offer being declined. I was dealing with one particular client, who I had a meeting with him last week. He’s a finance director who’d been trying to recruit the same role for, I think it’s getting on for about six months now. Over that period of time, he’d made three job offers and all three of those offers have been declined. The fact that this position had been open for almost six months now, it’s starting to have an impact on the business. Work that they wanted to get done was not getting done.
The amount of time that had been invested by him personally and also the management team in this process was massive. There are a couple of things that could we take away from his experience that I wanted to share with you that we can do to help prevent that situation. What we’re going to be talking about today is how we can predict, even before we interviewed a candidate if they’re likely to accept our job offer. The two questions we need to ask that will give us the health of the placement before the offer is ever made. Once we’ve answered these questions, what we can do with that information to increase the likelihood of the candidate’s accepting the offer. The first bit of information, the first thing that we need to know that is a key indicator of whether somebody’s going to accept your offer or not is a candidate’s reason for leaving.
We need to specifically know why the candidate is looking to leave their current role and this needs to be a professional reason for leaving as well. Quite often when we’ll ask people about reason for leaving or why somebody’s looking to leave their current role, we’ll get quite a general answer, so something like progression. This isn’t clear enough. Progression can mean a lot of things for a lot of different people. Progression for one person could be progressing from a financial controller to be a finance director, getting a promotion. Other people, they feel like they progress just by getting additional experience, additional skills. Specifically, we need to know what progression means for the candidates we’re going to interview or more generally what specifically is their reason for leaving their current role.
Once we know their reason for leaving, we need to ask ourselves the question how do we solve the candidate’s reason for leaving? What does our opportunity give them that will cause them to leave their current role? Unfortunately, if we aren’t able to solve their reason for leaving, it means it’s highly likely that the candidate is not going to accept your job offer or we’re going to have to make quite a high monetary offer to get the candidate to accept the role. We’ve answered those two questions. We know the candidate’s reason for leaving and we’ve had to think about potentially how we can solve the candidate’s reason for leaving, that the opportunities that exist with our organisation, additional skills and experience that the candidate could gain will cause them to come here.
Now, what do we do with this? Key thing is when we get to interview, we need to make sure the candidate comes away knowing these points. How I’d recommend you do this is you do the interview as normal, you thoroughly interview your candidate, you make sure you ask a lot of questions you want to ask, you probe as much as you want, and you’re comfortable and you know that this person is capable of doing your role. Then, I would spend the last 10 minutes of the interview explaining to them or talking to them about how you feel your organisation, your opportunity could solve their reason for leaving, so talking with them, what’s appropriate, and how you’re just going to solve the issues that they have with their current company.
It could be that we’ll just give them examples of how people have come into this role in the past and they’ve been promoted. If you’re success Mr. candidate, you’ll be able to do the same. If we do that, then we’ll be a position where the candidate will come out of the interview and their interest level will be at the highest point. It’ll mean that they’re more likely to accept your job offer if you were to extend it and take that offer over other offers that are extended to them. If we follow these steps, if we make sure we understand the candidate’s reason for leaving and we think about how our company can solve it, it’ll mean that we’ll be able to predict, potentially even before we interview a candidate, whether that candidate will accept our offer.
Sometimes, it might mean that we decide not to interview a candidate because we just know it’s highly unlikely that they will accept our offer because they will potentially have the same issues that they have within their current employer if they were to take our offer. It’ll save us time, potentially save us some heartache, and will also increase the likelihood of the candidate accepting our job offer as well. Before we sit down and interview somebody, let’s find out their reason for leaving. Let’s then think about how we solve that particular issue or problem that they’ve got. If you’re working with a good recruiter, they will be able to tell you the candidates reason for leaving and what problems your need to solve for them or we can just ask the candidate before the interview as well.
I hope you found this useful. For any other advice or tips on accountancy and finance recruitment, please feel free to get in touch with me. I’m Matthew Finch from BTG Recruitment. I look forward to speaking to you soon. Thank you.
BTG Recruitment are expert in accountancy and finance recruitment you can contact Matt on 0115 960 7000.
