When Candidates are Evaluating You
Our clients often have prior experience selecting from among a group of candidates eager to be considered for the role. But how to respond when that dynamic is flipped, and prospective candidates are mostly evaluating and choosing you?
“I’m the smartest person they could have chosen for this job” we were told by a Head of School not that long ago. Confidence? Hubris? we wondered, and asked him to explain. “Anyone smarter than me wouldn’t have taken the job.”
This is common knowledge among those seeking key leadership or revenue-facing roles: candidate beware. The organizational issues that you cannot see from the outside may prove to be frustrating obstacles to your success in a new position. The result? Many highly desirable potential candidates calculate that it is better to stick where they are, opting to wrangle the established relationships and known challenges right in front of them over taking on the risks in moving to a new organization.
The education clients we serve do their own searches regularly, and know how to assess the Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes associated with doing the typical roles. They find good ways of judging these ‘KSAs’ - beyond just the resume and standard interviews- and are good at ranking and screening candidates out of a process.
That approach doesn’t work when no one is applying. The obvious antidote seems to be to do things that increase the quantity of applicants. Yet sometimes we hear from clients what it’s like to work with a ‘placement agency’ or a clearinghouse type service that offers ready ‘access’ to a list or group of candidates. Response rates of people on those lists are notoriously low, and pre-screening is often limited, sometimes by design.
So when it’s a high-stakes high-profile leadership search, or the regular job postings just aren’t working, what might it take to increase the quality of candidates, not just the quantity? Organizations often don’t have practice actively ‘recruiting’. In our work, we actively draw out what is most important to candidates, provide them with transparency, and inspire their curiosity about a new opportunity.
When a candidate’s best option is their current career trajectory, you’ve got to have a reason for them to explore further, and a way to reach them personally and directly. Done well, it signals not only how you recruit but how it might feel for someone new to join and work within your organization.