Show Notes
This episode ended up being a brainstorming exercise on how Tyler can increase the acceptance rate of his job offers at
Less Annoying CRM.
Takeaways include:
- Survey candidates after they either accept or reject to learn more
- When someone says no, ask why they're saying no.
- That might lead to some really quick problems you could solve.
- Look at this from two lenses:
- Controllable rejections - there’s a way you could’ve changed this outcome.
- Uncontrollable rejections - there's no way you could've changed it.
- Even if it's uncontrollable, that doesn't mean there's no action you could've taken.
- You probably could have figured this out earlier in the interview process, and just stopped interviewing them because they were never going to accept anyway.
- Understand why people accept your offer
- This can lead to some of the best insights on the value propositions that you need to focus on more with future candidates.
- Highlight your differentiation throughout the interview process
- Make sure your candidates understand why your workplace is unique and special
- You can do this at every touchpoint
- When you make an offer, show them your excited
- Make a personal call or send a personal note
- Have other people at the company reach out after we give an offer to encourage them to accept
- Don’t be afraid to share your excitement with emotion
- Try making the offer in-person
- You could have them come into the office for a final meeting
- Or you could go to them
- Invite questions and concerns before a final decision
- Offer to go out and meet them and talk about stuff after the offer.
- Consider whether your acceptance rate is good enough
- Maybe it would be better to focus on more applicants instead of increase the conversion rate
- Make the written offer special
- Make the offer letter personal
- Sell the role and company instead of just explaining what the offer is.
- Answer the key questions about total compensation and benefits
- Before you make an offer, find out where the candidates stands
- Before you stop the final interview and move to offer mode, spend some time with the candidate and try to pull concerns out, pull anxieties out, pull out what might make them say no. Then address the issues before you make an offer.
- Question examples:
- “If you're not working here five years from now, what's the most likely reason why?”
- “If you were to decline our offer, what would be the most likely reason
- When you are the employer, there’s a power imbalance
- Keep this power imbalance in mind to avoid false signals and to make sure your candidate is comfortable
Introduction
Tyler: The topic for today is basically flipping interview advice on its head, and saying normally it's assuming that the company is in the driver's seat and has all the power. What I want to talk about today is after you get to the point where you know you want someone, well or before that point, but what can you do to really maximize the odds of someone actually accepting one of these offers. We have a coding fellow, which is where we teach people to code, we have two different internships, and we have a full time position we're recruiting for right now. It really, really sucks when you find the perfect person, you give them the offer, and they decline. I just want to avoid that if I can.
Rick: Yeah. Well, before the show I asked you I think what your acceptance rate was currently, can you share that?
Tyler: Yeah, this is kind of back of the napkin because we don't have a real applicant tracking system for this, but I would guess it's about 75% probably say yes, and 25% decline, would be my guess. More people decline earlier, but I'd say if we give an offer, some people bow out of the process before this, but if we give an offer, I'd say we have about 75%.
Rick: Cool. It sounds like what you want to focus on is how to increase that 75% up to a higher rate.
Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there's other benefits to this too. It's sort of like the way a good sales process for a company is going to lead to better customer retention also. This is the first impression for a recruit, and we want to build momentum that carries all the way through to after they start.
Rick: Okay. All right. Well, I guess, what would be success for this conversation?
Tyler: Yeah, I mean, what I'm looking for, I think, I mean ultimately the vague version of this is I just want to get people to actually say yes when I give them job offers. Specifically, I think I'd love a couple tangible takeaways or, not even... just ideas. I feel this is like a brainstorming thing where it's like maybe we can come up with five or ten things I can try, and maybe I'll actually actually try three of them, and one of them will work. But things I can actually do to just do more than whatever I'm doing now, which might be, in some ways, the bare minimum to get people to say yes.
How the interview and offer process works currently
Rick: Well can you talk about what you're doing now?
Tyler: Yeah. I'm inclined to break this into two categories. One is what's the whole interview process? Because that's leaving an impression on the person, and then there's the actual offer itself. I'm probably really bad at the offer itself. That's probably like the low hanging fruit here. But I'm happy to start at the beginning if you think that'd be helpful.
Rick: Totally up to you. We can dive in right to the offer, how you're positioning that, or you could add context about how you're going about this.
Tyler: Okay. Let me add a little context, but let's start by talking about the offer just because I think there's the most opportunity to improve there. We go and recruit mostly at schools, but sometimes through LinkedIn, or whatever other channel. The general process, it depends on the job, but it's something like a phone screen followed by, well sorry, they apply with a writing sample and a resume, we do a phone screen, then we bring them in for an in-person. The in-person interview is pretty long. And one of the reasons for that is it's like half us interviewing them, but half us trying to show them they would like it here. Which is easy for college students. With an adult, it's a little harder. Everyone wants different things. College students don't have a very refined idea of what they want. We play a board game with them, and give them free food, and they're like, "Oh great." But it's about a four-ish hour in-person with about half of that being us trying to make them think it's a cool place to work. Normally there's maybe let's say a week, or two, or three where we're finishing all those in-person interviews and we give the offer. What we do for that right now is I call them up. One thing I'm interested in your thoughts on is should it be me, should it be the person's direct manager calling them, but I call them up. No one ever picks up their phone, so the options are leave a voicemail, a vague voicemail that's like call me back or just give them the offer in the voicemail. I've dabbled with both. Right now I'm of the opinion you leave the voicemail with the offer in it, and then we send them an email with like basically a one page offer letter that's pretty light on details, but it's like, here's your job, here's the salary, here's the start date. Stuff like that.
Rick: How many of them know the offers coming before it comes?
Tyler: The phone offer or the official-
Rick: Both.
Tyler: Nobody knows the phone offer. I just call them. That's the first touchpoint.
Rick: And you don't send the written until they respond to the phone call?
Tyler: Okay. We've done different things here. What we used to do is, say I need to have a personal conversation with them, so I would leave a voicemail that's like, "This is Tyler from Less Annoying CRM, give me a call back," then I'd talk to them, then we'd send it. I listened to a
podcast called Manager Tools where they were like, "This is stupid. Why not just leave the..." To you, this seems normal, to you, the CEO, but to the candidate, even though it should be obvious to them, they're about to get an offer, they think the worst, and they're stressed out and nervous about this call. So they say, just leave the voicemail saying I want to give you the offer and then send the email.
Rick: Interesting.
Tyler: So I've started doing that.
Rick: Okay, cool. Both cases, they don't know it's coming unless they happen to listen to the voicemail that you left before the email arrives in their inbox, and they read it?
Tyler: Yeah, that's correct.
Why are people telling you no?
Rick: Got it. You mentioned 75% acceptance rate, that means 25% are telling you no. Do you have a good idea of why those people are saying no?
Tyler: Probably not. I mean, I have anecdotes. These are mostly college students. So it's normally that they're applying for multiple internships, and they're accepting a different one. What's the reason for them accepting a different one? I don't know the answer to that.
Rick: One quick thing I would do if I were you, this may not be Tyler style but, I would start asking, when someone says no, why they're saying no. That might lead to some really quick problems you could solve. I would look at this from two lenses. One is, there's controllable rejections, and that means, hey, there's something Less Annoying CRM could have done to change this outcome. And then there's uncontrollable outcomes, or decisions, or rejections, and those are things that you didn't have control over. There's no way you could've changed it. It'd be interesting to know if five people said no, how many of those one, are controllable, that you could have actually done something about, and then within that, what are the specific reasons why.
Tyler: Yeah, and I like this also. Even if it's uncontrollable, that doesn't mean there's no action I could've taken. For example, I know one person, this has happened several times, but one is vivid to me that they declined just because they wanted to spend the summer in their hometown. We probably could have figured that out earlier in the interview process, and just stopped interviewing them because they were never going to accept anyway. So it was uncontrollable, but still would have been useful information.
Rick: And I would say it's only uncontrollable if you wouldn't have allowed them to work remotely.
Tyler: Right. Which we're not going to for an intern.
Rick: There you go. There you go. So uncontrollable. Yeah.
Tyler: Well uncontrollable, but I can control not interviewing them in the first place.
Rick: Yeah. Especially if that was predetermined, better qualification would have saved you some time.
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's easy enough to do, to start asking for feedback. I've also considered asking for feedback from the people who say yes, which we do once the summer starts, but I get the feeling they've forgotten everything by then.
Rick: Totally. I think this is true of pretty much any win/loss decision, whether you're applying this to recruiting and making an offer to a candidate, or a sales funnel, or a renewal of an existing product, too many companies just focus on why did you leave, why did you say no, when there's really great insight in why did you say yes. At
PeopleKeep, we actually, it took me forever to figure this out, but we finally, and I don't even think I was the one who figured it out, one of our sales team leads said, "Hey, why don't we start asking information on why this company decided to move forward with PeopleKeep." And that's some of the best insights as to the key value propositions that you need to focus on more.
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, just to close the loop on what I said about people forgetting, I do think there's, timing matters a lot here. You're talking about asking customers for feedback, sometimes we have the problem where we do that right after they pay us, and they're like, "I'm still so new, I can't give you any." But the reverse can happen where it's like, "It's been too long, and I don't remember." So catching someone at the right moment where it's fresh in their mind is probably pretty important here.
Rick: Yeah. Timing of survey of any kind makes a big difference in the responses.
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hmm, okay. Probably just getting more feedback from everybody, that's a second order action in the sense of like, then I have to take that information and do something with it. But that sounds like a tangible step I can take.
Rick: Now, and this is, if I were you, I would end the conversation right now, and that'd be the only thing I focused on, because at the end of the day we're going to throw out ideas, and we don't know if any of these are actually do anything. So there's two approaches. One, you can figure out the problem first, and then try solutions to that problem, or you can just try things and see if it increases the rate.
Tyler: Yeah. The hard thing is the sample size is low enough that I can't really run an AB test here. There might be one or two people who decline an offer this whole year potentially. That could be useful information, but I don't want to base my entire plan on that. I need some intuition here also.
Are you surprised when someone says no?
Rick: Maybe this is a better question, given the small sample size, how often are you surprised when someone says no?
Tyler: Sometimes. There are some people who we know they're a long shot, and it's not a surprise at all. There are other times, especially with the coding fellowship, which coding fellowship's an amazing deal. We're effectively paying them to learn, and not even work for us. We've had a couple of people decline that where I'm just like, what in the fuck are you thinking? So I've been surprised before, yeah.
Rick: Okay. It sounds like the surprising ones are the ones that you probably don't want to be surprised about anymore or you want to save.
Tyler: Yeah. I should have asked them what happened, but without that information it's hard to know if that would have been something I could have uncovered in advance or not?
Rick: I mean we can talk about what you're doing when you make the offer. Tell me how you think about the offer in terms of maximizing the acceptance rate. Because I'm assuming you don't get to the offer stage unless you're super like, I want this person, and I'm assuming you're putting your best offer forward right now.
Tyler: Yeah. Well, even if you're in the middle, if you're like, I'm a little so-so on this person, but it's the best person we got in the pipeline, so I'm going to... There's no reason to communicate that to them. Right? You should be like, "I think you're a perfect fit. This is going to be"... Because you either want them to say yes or you don't.
Rick: And if they don't, then you don't make an offer.
Tyler: Right. Exactly. So yes, I'm absolutely trying to do this. Now I think there's a big weakness of mine, and this is true with management too. I think there's a lot of ways in which I'm a kind boss, like flexibility, and trust, and all that, but I'm not a particularly effusive person.
Rick: Effusive?
Tyler: Effusive, like wearing my emotions on my sleeve, and being really communicative about how excited I am and stuff. I'm a little more reserved. You know this about me. This is probably, I mean, I think, I don't know why I'm talking to you about this because I think I already know the answer, which is I need to figure out a way to communicate better how excited I am. Because I call, I leave a voicemail, and basically it goes like this. "Hey so and so this is Tyler from Less Annoying CRM. Just wanted to let you know we were really impressed by you. Think you'd be a great member of the team. I'd really love to work with you. Emily's going to send you an offer letter. If you have any questions, let me know. Bye."
When you make an offer, show them your excited
Rick: And does anyone else reach out to the person and say, "Congrats on the offer. We're excited to have you"?
Tyler: No. I mean Emily, the recruiting person does. But that's an interesting point. You mean like other people who would be on that person's team being like-
Rick: Well, you got a bunch of people who are involved in the hiring process, from what you said earlier-
Tyler: Yeah. About eight people will talk to somebody during the interview. Yeah.
Rick: It seems like hearing from those eight people might be a good try, at least, to see if that increases-
Tyler: Yeah, yeah, that's obvious. But I've never tried that. Yeah.
Rick: ... So, let's talk about how to make that person feel like they're desired, and there's genuine excitement about them saying yes.
Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely.
Rick: So like, so that's one category here. I, yeah, one is, have multiple people reach out saying, "Congrats. And please join us, and if you have concerns, let us address them." You know?
Tyler: Yeah, and I've done, okay, so we mostly hire interns and occasionally hire full-timers outright. There have been times with full-timers where we'll say like, "After the offer, can, the people who will be on your team take you out to dinner, and kind of schmooze you a little?" We don't do that with interns because it's just, I mean, partially it's expensive. But honestly, it's more that the interns think they don't have time for it. They're like, "Oh, I have an exam tomorrow," or whatever. But okay, so, but that could be done over email or phone instead, I guess. Is what you're saying.
Try making the offer in-person
Rick: Yep. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of, within that category, there's a lot of ideas. I mean, you could say, "Hey, let's go grab a beer," you know? Let's, come play another game, and talk about the offer. That leads me to another idea, which is, I don't know if this is, I haven't tried this myself, but, you have kind of an internal rule of, you won't make an offer unless it's in person. So maybe you say, "Hey, come," you set up this, this final interview, where they actually come to you, or you meet them at a neutral site. And you say, "We'd like to make you an, here's the offer. We're really excited." And you actually do that, in person.
Tyler: Interesting. I'm trying to think of the, have you done that before?
Rick: No, I haven't. But I think I am, so I have to disclaim a lot of my advice, here. Most of my advice is based on my sales experience. I had never focused, one of my biggest regrets about my time, I never focused enough on recruiting. I always, I focused more on other things, then who we were hiring, which was definitely a mistake. So a lot of these things are things that I'm thinking of, based on your situation, that I could actually see myself doing going forward, in my new ventures. But have I tried them? Most likely not.
Tyler: Because I think that idea, like, my first reaction was, "Oh yeah, that'd be interesting." But right after that, I'm thinking logistics of, it's hard enough to schedule an in person interview with them. To say we're going to do another one, or like, I wouldn't want to make them travel. Because I can see them resenting me for that. Like, "You made me drive all the way down here, so you could give me an offer?" So I'd want to go to them, if we were going to do that, probably. But the thing that this podcast I was referencing earlier said, that I thought was really interesting is, they're like, "There's the same dynamic when it's a boss and an employee at work. If you're a boss, you should never slack somebody and be like, "Hey, can you meet me in the conference room in five minutes?" In your mind, you're like, "I have a question, I need to ask them." It's no big deal at all. But in their mind they're like, "This is it. I'm about to get fired." And I've had this before.
Rick: Oh, gosh.
Tyler: Seriously, I've had this before where like, I'll say that to someone and they'll come in the conference room like sweaty and nervous. And I'm just like, "Hey, I was just wondering if, like what's the status of that project?" So to me, it's no big deal, but to them it is. What they were saying is, that same dynamic applies to interviewing. And you don't want to leave them in suspense. I don't know if you buy that or not.
Rick: That feels right. I think creating an uncomfortable situation for anyone is generally a bad idea, if you, like. So avoiding that, but I think, I don't think that that's mutually exclusive. I don't think that excludes ... you can have a situation that does not leave them in suspense, that leads to them getting an offer in person.
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: And maybe that's just how you structure and explain your interview process, upfront.
Tyler: Well, yeah, but I-
Rick: Right now, you say the final interview is this, and we're going to make a decision. You could say, "Hey, we have one more interview."
Tyler: So then you're kind of lying. You're either misleading them, you're leaving it super vague, or you're doing something to communicate, "You know you're getting an offer, here."
Rick: Well, the thing that actually causes suspense with most people is, the truth. That's what's so crazy about this whole sad thing. So like one, if you really want to eliminate suspense in life, you need to lie to yourself and have other people lie to you. So, you can't have both worlds.
Tyler: I guess, But they're going to know it's a lie, immediately. Like, I would resent someone doing that to me. Saying I'm going to interview it. Because I would go prep for it, and I'd be like calling former employees. Like, "What should I expect here," and all this.
Rick: I don't disagree with you in this particular, I don't actually like that solution. I mean, I more just threw it out as an example of how you could approach it, and not create suspense.
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: You're already creating suspense by saying, "Hey, we'll get back to you," when you have that final interview, right? They're waiting for this call. Correct?
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah.
Rick: How quickly are you making that call, after?
Tyler: It depends. If we, as soon as we make a decision, we make the call. So sometimes, I literally call them while they're still in the building, leaving. Like, I just go run in and talk to everyone and I'm like, "That was a home run, right?" And everyone's like, "Yes." And I just call them immediately. But, sometimes it's like we legitimately need to interview other people.
Rick: What if you said, "Hey, can you sit here for a second," before they left? You went and had the huddle, and you got to yes, and you went back in and said, "We would like to make you an offer."
Tyler: I have done that once before.
Rick: How did it go?
Invite questions and concerns before a final decision
Tyler: I think, really well. It went really well, except I'll say that, like the thing I want from an in person interview, or an in-person conversation, is for them to have questions and for us to talk about stuff. This guy was just in shock because, actually, he was applying for the fellowship and I gave him an internship. He wasn't even applying for this position. It was, what he got was better. He was just like, very close to literally, speechless. So I guess, he accepted. Not on the spot. He didn't have any, there was no productive conversation after that. So I'm actually thinking, I like the idea of having this in person conversation, but I think, what I'm thinking is, call, say, "You've got the offer, let me come sell you on it," basically.
Rick: That's interesting. Invite, basically say, "Hey, don't say no. If you have concerns, just, don't say no. Come talk to me about it. And if you decide not to take this, I'll be completely understanding. But give us our best shot at explaining why this is the greatest place for you."
Tyler: Yeah. So, I like that a lot. What do you think I say in the, like, I'm not good at sales. And this is effectively, a sale. What do I do, in that conversation?
Rick: Well, I think it's very situational, which is hard, here.
Tyler: You're saying, I have to be good at sales?
Is your problem acceptance rate or do you need more applicants?
Rick: I would back up and say like, listen, your problem isn't your acceptance rate. You need more applicants. You need more people running through your funnel. So like, you have a 75% acceptance rate. That's awesome. And in sales, a 50% close rate is awesome. You're beating that by 25%. So, at the end of the day here, you probably have very different situations of why people are saying no, they're probably not all the same. And if I were, I guess it comes down to, what are you selling?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: And if you're selling, "Hey, I want you to be excited that you got an offer, so that, and I want you to feel comfortable talking to me, before you make a decision. And I'd like," and you're selling in-person? You can always sell the next step, which takes the pressure off of the close, if you will? Like selling, "Yes," at this point you're selling, talking about, "Yes." I don't know.
Tyler: Yeah. Well, so I have a question for you here, because drawing the comparison with sales, there's this dynamic I think, between sales and let's call it customer success. Or, whoever's responsible for revenue and customer service after the sale is made. I think there's this dynamic that, the better a salesperson is at persuading people to say yes, the worse the job for customer service and customer success is. Because, more people who are not a good fit, say yes. So maybe, let me backup, here. Should I, if we're at 75%, should I be saying, "There's 25% that said no. They saw the company, they met the people, they still said no. Maybe we don't want them to be here."
Rick: Absolutely. But you don't know enough right now to know if that's true, so the best way to validate that is to gather data as to why they're making the decisions that they're making. If there's some people out there who you were like, "Man, I have a high amount of confidence that they missed out and we missed out," then it seems like this is worth putting some effort into improving.
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: But again, I mean, you're at 75% acceptance rate, man. Like, maybe this energy would be better spent, doubling the number of applicants you have.
Tyler: Well, we're trying to do both. One reason I like that, there's, we give so few offers. It's relatively, if it's like spending an extra hour on each one, that's not a major time commitment.
Rick: And these are your best ones.
Tyler: These are the best people. And like, one good hire, makes such a difference. So. Yeah.
Rick: So yeah, in-person is one. I don't think, I generally, I'm not a sale, "Selling the close," kind of guy. I'm a, "Sell the process," guy. So it's about having a good process that if people opt in to the next step, it's a qualification in and of itself. At this point, you're at the point where you've made an offer, and you want them to say yes. And right now you're saying, "Say yes or no," and that's the end of your process, right? So at the offer stage, you could extend that to a next step, which is, "Come in the office and let's talk about what it would look like if you joined. But if you'd like to just say yes, say yes."
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. So, I don't think the conversation's over yet, but let me recap what I've gotten from this.
Tyler: First of all, I should be asking, for people who say no, "Why did you say no?" For people who've said yes, just overall feedback, "What were you maybe a little shaky on? What are some questions we could have answered?" Like, no?
Rick: No. I think, I actually think you ask positive questions. What-
Tyler: Well, probably both, I think, then.
Rick: ... Both, yeah.
Tyler: Okay.
Rick: Yeah.
Tyler: And then, when giving the offer, as an extra step offer, I don't want to add, well, I could offer them to come down, but I think we give few enough that I could say, "I'll come out to you, if you want, and we can talk about this," basically.
Make the written offer special
Tyler: Those all seem pretty doable. Pretty low effort. Do you think there's anything in what we send them in the offer letter, that ... eh, you wouldn't know about our-
Rick: Yes, absolutely.
Tyler: ... Yeah? Okay.
Rick: Absolutely. So I think, I don't know what your offer letter looks like, but-
Tyler: It's very transactional.
Rick: Okay. I used to poo poo proposals at PeopleKeep, and then we had someone come in and just totally, just make our offer, our proposal, awesome. And, it makes a difference. I don't know how much of a difference, but it increases the open rate. People who, it increases the digestion rate. So, what is-
Tyler: What did they do, to make it so good?
Rick: ... well, it depends. They made it feel, they've focused on UX or, the experience of reading it. And then we, one thing we focused on was, total compensation. So you know, a lot of people, a lot of offers are five pages long. They have a bunch of legalese in them, they're structured as a contract. Yeah, sure, you should have your employment contract. But if you could come up with a really awesome, I kind of think of like, you know these great letters you see? Whenever you get a really great graphical letter? You ever read like, annual reports from Fortune 500 companies? And, do you ever do this?
Tyler: No, but I know what they look like, yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Well, there's usually a message letter from the CEO, in the front. And that kind of, in a very simple way summarizes, what that CEO wants all the shareholders to understand about the business. And it's like, those two pages in the form of an offer letter, that are very approachable, and call out the key points to help the candidate understand the key questions about the job offer. How much am I going to get paid? What are the benefits of working here? You know, traditional benefits, not a Less Annoying CRM, special benefits. But like health insurance, dental, that kind of stuff. Answering the question of stock options, answering the question of why working at Less Annoying CRM is unique in its own right and what you'd be giving up by saying no that you won't be able to get elsewhere. Those types of things.
Tyler: Yeah. So this is kind of ... We keep drawing this back to like how to market a product. One thing I have learned and I think a lot of people still get wrong is when someone's on your signup page, a lot of companies are like they're ready to sign up. Just have them sign up. The reality is you should keep selling them. Even after they sign up, the first email you send them should keep selling them. And so the offer letter shouldn't say, well we're done selling. It's time for them to say yes or no. It should be like, we're going to sell all the way up until they say no.
Rick: Yeah. We talked a couple months ago about or maybe a month ago about a manual, using your employee manual or handbook to help with recruiting. The offer letter should be reinforcing those key messages that are the reasons that once people work with you for a couple months they go "Man, this place is so special."
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: Listen, if the person gets that offer and goes, "Man, this isn't for me," and they say no, awesome. If they're saying no for the right reasons, you don't want to ...
Tyler: Yeah. We didn't want them anyway.
Rick: Yeah.
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. I think personalizing it, probably more like ... Emily's the one sending the offer but having other employees reaching out, having the offer link to the employee handbook which has a lot of culture and communicates our values really well, probably me personally reaching out either for an in person or ... I could do the same thing you're saying other employees should do. Just send them an email and be like, "It was awesome meeting you. Here's a little detail specific to you so you know this isn't boilerplate text basically." Okay? Cool. I think we can improve that.
Rick: I would just kind of label this as highlight the differentiation. That needs to be highlighted throughout the whole offer process, which I think that you're doing a pretty good job of but maybe cementing that with the offer would be great as this is real. The other one is do you have a start date negotiated prior to the offer or is that ...
Tyler: Normally, yeah.
Rick: Okay.
Tyler: Because with interns we want them all to start at the same time because it's like a cohort of people.
Rick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What about for the CRM coach?
Tyler: With that we will ... like here's the earliest we can take you and there's flexible ... That's normally a conversation. It's not negotiated in advance normally no.
Rick: After they accept the offer, it's a when can you start kind of thing.
Tyler: Yeah. It's pretty rare that we're very picky about when they start.
Rick: Do you have any reason to believe that start date could be influencing the acceptance rate right now?
Tyler: I don't think so. We hire so few full-timers that ... I'm trying to think. The last time we had someone decline us for a full time position was probably four years ago.
Rick: Okay.
Tyler: Because we give like one off ... We do this whole interview process. We're like this person's the perfect fit. We know they're going to say yes.
Before you make an offer, find out where the candidates stands
Rick: One other thing, just brainstorming here, is do you ask any questions maybe a week or two, during the interview process prior to getting to the are we going to make an offer stage to sort of gauge whether or not if an offer was presented they would say yes?
Tyler: We certainly don't. I'm having trouble visualizing what you mean.
Rick: I don't know. In sales ... I don't know. There's a way to maybe before you say goodbye in your last interview to say ... I mean, one very blunt way to say it is, "Hey, if we do make you an offer, would you say yes?"
Tyler: Oh, that makes me so uncomfortable.
Rick: I know it does.
Tyler: They have to say yes though.
Rick: Do they?
Tyler: Well, I mean if I'm being interviewed and you asked me that, I'd be like, "Yeah, of course."
Rick: And then you'd say no after that?
Tyler: Yeah, potentially. Why would you say no to that? It's just sabotaging yourself.
Rick: Well, maybe the question is the wrong question, but the idea here ... Let's focus on the idea behind the question. We want to know where they stand.
Tyler: I think the difference between this and sales though is that in sales, the customer ultimately has the power. In this case, there's this huge power imbalance in the other direction that I think makes it hard to ask questions and get an honest answer. I would love to have that information. That'd be great. But I don't know how to get it without being like really abusive. Like you could just be like, "Tell me the truth."
Rick: One way to soften it might be, "So Tyler, this is the last interview. After this interview we're going to huddle and decide whether we're going to make you an offer. We hate making offers and having unaddressed issues. So is there anything that we should talk about now that could cause you to say no to this offer if we decided to say yes?"
Tyler: Yeah, that's interesting. Let me frame that a little differently. You could imagine saying basically if you're going to decline this offer anyway, you've got nothing to lose here. If there's something that's been left unsaid, you've only got upside here to say it because otherwise the opportunity is gone anyway. That wasn't well articulated. But yeah, saying why would you lie to me about this if you're going to say no anyway?
Rick: Just their body language might tell you a lot. It would certainly give you more visibility into how the offer process will go and maybe you can change your tactics based on where that person is.
Tyler: Yeah. I have to think about the right way to actually do that. That has to come at the very end I think because anything before that and they'll be like, "Well, I don't know yet. I haven't gotten to the end."
Rick: It's kind of like, "Hey, we're about to make a decision. After that it's going to be this awkward thing where you feel like you have to say yes or no within a certain time frame. Is there anything else we should talk about?"
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: "We should know that you want to know prior to starting that?"
Takeaways
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. I like that idea. So great. We have more time if we want it. I feel like we've gotten a lot of good ideas. Should we kind of go to takeaways here or do you have other thoughts you want to ...
Rick: No. I just wonder if there's ... Do you feel like you've gotten out of this what you want?
Tyler: Yeah, no, this is great. I love a conversation like this where there's tactical, tangible things and not just vague hand-wavy things. I'm probably going to miss these all. One thing I love about the podcast by the way is every time you have one of these, you give me an idea, I'm inclined to go write it down. I'm like, "Oh no, we're recording this. I'll just go listen to this." If I'm remembering correctly, these are all specific things I can do. Survey people after they either accept or reject to learn more. Have other people at the company reach out after we give an offer to encourage them to accept. Make the offer letter more personal and sell the benefits instead of just explain what the offer is. Offer for me personally to go out and meet them and talk about stuff after the offer. What we just talked about was asking them in the final round of the interview, "Is there anything we need to talk about here?" It's the same question I ask in one-on-ones to try and get feedback from people. There's different ways to ask it, but the way I asked it most recently is if you're not working here five years from now, what's the most likely reason why? Right?
Rick: I love it.
Tyler: I could ask them if you decline, what's the most likely reason? Then we can address that.
Rick: Yeah. I would actually summarize that takeaway as before you stop the interview and move to offer mode you spend some time with the candidate trying to pull concerns out, pull anxieties out, pull out what hasn't covered or may make them to say no.
Tyler: Yeah, I like that a lot. Now I'll listen to this again and see if I missed anything. Can you remember us talking about any other takeaways?
Rick: There's one I'd add and we didn't say this very eloquently prior. Listen, you have some really cool things about your company that people really get once they've worked there. You've got it outlined mostly in your handbook. If you can just inject that messaging consistently throughout the process starting with your automated email that gets sent when someone applies for a job and ending with how you present the offer and even what you're leaving on the voicemail. I think just injecting and having that consistent messaging, the differentiating messaging about Less Annoying CRM will go a long way in terms of just making sure people know ... They're saying no knowing what Less Annoying CRM is all about.
Tyler: Yeah. That's interesting. That makes me wonder if I should almost take a contrarian approach here and basically when I give them the offer be like, "You could probably tell this, but this company is different. It's not for everyone. You should really read this and make sure you understand this is the tribe you want to be a part of."
Rick: Yes. That is the most powerful thing. And when people say no to that, you'll never feel bad.
Tyler: Yeah. Hm. Okay. Awesome. I like that.
Rick: And if it doesn't work, I'm sorry. If you're accepted rate goes to 25%, I'm sorry.
Tyler: Well, it's super consistent with how we do normal business though. We don't sell our CRM like, "Oh, this is how amazing it is." It's a very we are Less Annoying. We don't really have any features anyone else has. No one's excited about their CRM.
Rick: Either it's for you or it's not and if it's not that's okay with us.
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Great. Well yeah, thanks for all those ideas. I hope anyone listening also ... I think all of these could be applied almost everywhere. I'm definitely going to go think about probably ... We have interviews tomorrow. I'm going to go do some of this tomorrow, so this is going to be really immediately helpful for me, so thanks.
Rick: Yeah, one more note for me and then I'll sign us off. I think one thing that is different about recruiting that I often take for granted and maybe others do too is the power imbalance. When you're the hiring manager, when you are the boss, when you are the CEO, whatever your title is, there is this very different thing that's unique to employing someone that you, if you're unaware of it can cause some false signals. Being uber aware of the impact you're having on a person just due to that balance goes a long way and you're really, really good at that. So anyway, I hope that was helpful Tyler.
Tyler: Yeah, definitely.
Rick: Thanks for listening everyone. You can join the conversation on this topic and review past topics by visiting startuptolast.com. If you have questions, contact us via Twitter or the website. We've actually gotten some new Twitter followers this past week which was kind of fun because I've had some direct messages back and forth. However you want to connect with us, we want more engagement and hear your thoughts and ideas. Again that's startuptolast.com and we'll see you next week.
Tyler: All right, see you.