7 Critical Factors to Consider Before You Make a Job Offer.
Let’s assume you’ve gone through all of the expected steps to prepare to make a job offer. You’ve:
- Reviewed applications and resumes to select the most qualified candidates to interview.
- Got three-year salary and compensation history.
- After pre-screening, invited your best candidates in to interview with your interview team.
- Held second and even third interviews with your candidates who appear to be the best fit and most qualified for your position.
- Obtained interview debriefing information from all team members who participated in your interview process.
- Performed reference and background checks to validate each finalist’s credentials.
Factors That Should Influence Your Job Offer Decision
You’ve now reached the most critical point in the multi-step hiring process. Given your essentially qualified candidates, who will get the job offer? Do you rely on the collective impressions from your interviewing team? Do you go with your gut and make the job offer to the candidate that you like the best? Pick the person whose recent experience is most relevant to your company’s products and customers? The final hiring decision can often be a tough call every time you want to make a job offer.
Here are seven essential factors that you must consider when you decide which candidate will receive your job offer.
At this point, your candidates have been verified as having particular skills and experience. Use these additional factors to make your hiring decision.
- Review the feedback information from the people who served on your interview team. It’s impossible for 10-12 people to sit at the table to make the final decision, but their input deserves attention and review. Before a recent job offer, three interview team members gave the hiring manager the feedback that one of the candidates appeared to have a 9 to 5 mindset.
In a company where every employee does whatever needs to be done, when needed, this vibe rubbed the interviewers the wrong way. It was the ultimate deal breaker for the candidate who did not receive the job offer.
- Obtain feedback from former supervisors, peers and subordinates. You should be able to do this through detailed and thorough reference checking. Yes, people change, but not that much, and not that quickly. So, performance feedback, and especially the positive response to the question, would you rehire this employee, should be a powerful factor in your decision to make a job offer. (If time is of the essence, offers can always be made subject to the satisfactory completion of reference and any background checks.)
- Assess the candidate’s potential to fit within your culture. The time you spend with each candidate is an opportunity to do this. Does this mean that you select the candidate you like the best? Not if you want to make the best job offer. What you should be looking for in considering cultural fit is the candidate who will succeed in your workplace. For example, you don’t want to select an individual who prefers to work alone for a job whose role will only succeed by influencing a larger team.
You also don’t want to make a job offer to a candidate who was energetic, forceful, and well-qualified – when he interviewed with your company’s executives. But, in the interview with potential coworkers, he literally talked over their heads, impatiently checked his watch several times, and asked, “Is that all?” after the fifth or sixth question. He won’t fit in a culture that values the unique contribution of each employee, regardless of level or job.
On the other hand, you don’t want to eliminate a hard-charging candidate, even if she makes the committee a bit uncomfortable with her energy, dedication, and drive. Maybe your organization could use the energy and drive things up a notch. So, be careful with cultural fit. The goal is not that all employees are plain and simple when you consider making a job offer.
- Be confident that the potential employee, with appropriate training and mentoring, can do the job. In answering this question, you also need to assess your candidate’s relevant experience. Rarely is a new job an exact match with what an employee did in another organization. Perhaps your candidate for a customer service role has fantastic verbal skills and professionally and positively served customers face-to-face all day long. Can he bring these skills to bear on a customer service function that is 100% on the phone and by email?
Maybe, maybe not. Did you test his ability to write a coherent email? Will he thrive in an environment in which his only face-to-face interaction is with coworkers? These are tough questions when you assess a candidate’s ability to do your job before you make a job offer.
- Will the candidate continue to grow his skills in your organization? This powerful question needs an answer when you consider making a candidate a job offer. The ability of your employees to grow, develop new skills, and keep up with the changing world and marketplace is critical. What did you hear the candidate say during the interviews that convinced you he is committed to keep growing? What in the candidate’s background tells you that the potential employee is committed to ongoing development?
Does your candidate read, participate in conferences and events, and stay abreast of his field professionally? Is he interested in the world and do you have the sense that he continually looks at the marketplace and adjusts his skills and practices accordingly? Does he learn new programming languages and obtain viable certifications? You must see evidence of a commitment to growth. If he doesn’t have this commitment prior to your job offer, he won’t suddenly obtain it when you hire him to do your job.
- Which of your candidates has the most upside potential? This question leads us into the next factor that needs serious consideration before you make a job offer. Beyond a commitment to learning and developing more skills, will your candidate be capable of progressing in your organization? If an employee, does she have managerial potential and interest? Can you see her developing the skills necessary to lead a project team? You are not making a job offer just for your currently open job. You are asking an individual to join your company. And, it is often way too tempting to hire the first warm body who can do the job – an unfilled position is painful and the work is piling up. And worse than not having a position filled, is having it filled by the wrong person.
- Which candidate will add overall strategic and personal value to your workplace? Which candidate can you visualize working across department boundaries to forge cohesive solutions for customers? Will one of your candidate’s head up philanthropic giving over time – she expressed a deep commitment to giving to the community and her actions bore out her words. Did one of your candidates exhibit behaviors in the past that lead you to believe that she will continue to care about coworkers in her new job, should you make the job offer.
You need to consider the overall value that the candidate offered in her prior employment. Did she learn the company’s products even though her job was not to sell them? Did she keep up with the happenings in different departments and exhibit an overall value for and concern about the whole organization? Or, did she sit at her desk and just do her job? You are seeking to make the job offer to the candidate most likely to add value to your overall organization and its customers.
These are seven critical factors you should consider before you make any job offer. And to insure the best possible outcome, your offer, along with the selected candidate’s response needs to be resolved in as short a time as possible.
Let these be a catalyst for reviewing and assessing your recruiting and hiring process, including your interview questions. They just may help make your workplace recruiting and hiring work better.