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Delivering Job Offers 🙌 5 Tactics To Win Top Candidates

You did all the work. You interviewed a candidate and found them a role at your company that they will LOVE. Your internal team agreed on a comp band and initial offer, and now it’s time to deliver that offer to the candidate. What do you do?

This is one of the most important conversations for managers and recruiters. Getting to the finish line with a candidate and not closing the deal is a VERY expensive miss.

Here are 5 quick tips that will improve how you deliver job offers.

Tip #1 🔍 Gather critical information

Every great recruiter and hiring manager is searching for 2 pieces of information at the beginning of the recruiting process:

1. The candidate’s primary motivation. For some candidates it’s compensation. For other candidates it’s setting themselves up to start their own company in a few years. Learn this asap!

Pro-tip 💡 One way to learn a candidate’s primary motivation is by asking ‘why are you leaving your current job’ in your first chat with them

2. Your company’s competitive advantages. If you’re a startup, it’s unlikely that you’ll compete with a BigTech offer on cash salary alone. Perhaps equity ownership is attractive to a candidate. Or the opportunity to learn and do new things in different domains. Or they are motivated by a grand mission. Learn this asap too!

Tip #2 ✨ Conversational >>> ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ offers

A common approach to delivering job offers is to describe each part of the offer on a call, and then at the end say “let us know by Friday if you accept”. We call this the ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach, and we are not fans 🙅‍♀️

Instead, make the offer call conversational. A conversational offer call naturally leads into a negotiation process, and it’s incredibly friendly and comfortable for everybody. Kick off the call with friendly questions, “you’ve had a chance to talk with everybody .. how do you like the team? How are you feeling about the company and the vision?” Candidate answers drive an escalation of commitment: “Yes, yes, yes!”

Bonus 🎁 To save you some time, we wrote a detailed conversational script that you can find at the end of the article. You can follow this script from top-to-bottom on your next offer call

Tip #3 ⁉️ Ask clarifying questions

At every step in the recruiting process, asking clarifying questions helps both you and the candidate learn if it’s a good fit. The most important thing is to match a candidate with a job that they will love, and the sooner that you can figure out whether your company is that right fit or not the better.

It should never be a surprise whether a candidate accepts an offer or not. Asking questions is the only way to 1) get to know candidates, and 2) make sure you avoid surprises!

Tip #4 ⛔🎉 Never say ‘congratulations’ until the offer is accepted

By saying ‘congrats’ you totally shift the power dynamics of the conversation – Our work isn’t done until a candidate joins the team

Pro-tip 💡 Instead of saying “congrats”, say “good to chat, looking forward to working with you.” Jump to a conversation about “what it will be like to work together”, and highlight that this is an important decision to make – It’s not a celebration yet

Tip #5 🧑‍💼 Manage expectations on your team

The tips above, and the script below will help you win more candidates. However, not all candidates will accept your job offers. It’s important to control the expectations of your team (interview panel, local team a candidate would work with, hiring manager, execs), to avoid over-promising results. It’s helpful to set expectations (and repeat them frequently) that you’re working with a very competitive candidate.

Pro-tip 💡 It’s super important to get teammates excited about the potential of a candidate joining, but we gotta marry excitement with the reality of a tough recruiting market

Bonus – 🆓 Free job offer call script

This approach is conversational, and includes calculated moments – such as pinch points and escalations of commitment

Drop in your email and download the complete script. Enjoy!

I’ve personally used this script to deliver dozens of job offers – both senior execs and junior hires – with tremendous success. And it works whether you’re in a large company, or a startup. You may have a rigid comp philosophy, or you may not yet have comp bands. The conversational nature of the script is friendly and flexible.

Please reach out to me if you have any questions 🚀 patrick@staffparty.com