Has The Candidate You Just Hired Stopped Looking?

Enormous amounts of time, energy, and money have been spent attracting, evaluating, and selecting candidates. Yet many behave as though the hard work ends when an offer is accepted.

After all, by that point the position has been posted, candidates sourced, interviews conducted, references checked, compensation negotiated, an offer extended, … and accepted.

Unfortunately, that assumption is often one of the most expensive mistakes your business can make.

While your recruitment team may believe it’s completed a hiring decision, today’s candidate hasn’t finished making theirs.

Accepting an offer isn’t the end of the hiring process any more than it’s a commitment to an organization. It’s the next step where the real test begins. As expectations meet reality, promises meet experiences and the futures each envisioned begin to take shape—or don't.

During the recruiting process, candidates evaluate what they can see. They assess the role, the compensation, the opportunity, and the people they meet.

Prior to the moment a candidate accepts your offer, they've been evaluating opportunities and possibilities, a 'vision of the future' they’ve been sold. What they cannot fully evaluate is what it will be like to work in your organization day after day.

After acceptance, they begin to discover what it will actually be like to work in your business and live in its realities. 

While your staff begins to evaluate them, they begin to experience the people, culture, leadership, and opportunities they were promised while learning whether they match the daily reality of their new role.

Once the position has been filled and the search is over, attention naturally shifts to the next priority. Managers return to their already full schedules. Leadership turns its attention elsewhere. Everyone assumes the difficult part of the hiring process is behind them and hopes the new employee's transition is progressing as expected. Yet the newly hired employee is paying close attention to everything they see, hear, and experience because every interaction provides additional evidence regarding whether they made the right decision.

This is where many businesses unknowingly start to undermine the very hiring decision they worked so hard to make.

Organizations rarely do this intentionally. Once a position is filled, the urgency that drove the hiring decision gives way to the urgency of putting that decision to work. Attention naturally shifts from integrating the new employee into the organization to driving for immediate impact without realizing the impact on the new employee.

The challenge is that the organization and the new employee are no longer focused on the same thing. While the organization is focused on reducing pressure and improving performance, the new employee is still determining whether the reality they are experiencing matches the future they were promised.

Making a great hiring decision and creating a successful hire are not the same thing. One is a decision. The other, a process.

The hiring decision determines who joins your business. What happens next determines whether that decision succeeds.

The moment a candidate accepts your offer is not the finish line. It's a new starting line.

The future they were sold becomes the future they experience—or it doesn't.

While the candidate may have temporarily stopped looking for a job, they're still asking themselves one important question: “Did I join the right organization?”

If you'd like to explore whether your organization is creating the conditions that allow great hiring decisions to become successful long-term hires, let's spend 20 minutes talking.

Questions? Email larry@mandelberg.biz. Want to learn how to build a framework that generates sustainable, profitable growth? It’s all in Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide — how to survive success and thrive in good times and bad.