They said "Yes!"
You know your organization is awesome. Potential new employees may need to be convinced. So, treat job offers as parts of strategic sales. The way you handle offers and support your offerees’ due diligence efforts will impact the way they feel about you and your organization. You want offerees to say “yes “if taking the job is the right move for them, their supporters, and the organization over time. You want a “no, thanks” if they are not.
Onboarding is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating, and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization. The prerequisite to successful onboarding is getting your organization aligned around the need and the role.
- Align: Make sure your organization agrees on the need for a new team member and the delineation of the role you seek to fill.
- Acquire: Identify, recruit, select, and get people to join the team.
- Accommodate: Give new team members the tools they need to do the work.
- Assimilate: Help them join with others so they can do the work together.
- Accelerate: Help them and their team deliver better results faster.
Getting people to join the team is a critical pivot point, worthy of the deliberate thinking that accompanies a successful strategic sale. Here are the steps from the offer closing tool from our Onboarding book. [Click here to request a copy of the tool itself.]
Note the Candidate and Position:
Key Influencers. Identify the players and influencers in the candidate’s decision-making process including:
- Economic buyer: The decision-maker who can say yes – generally the candidate.
- User buyer: The candidate.
- Technical buyers: People that can say “no” but can’t say “yes” – like past, present and future family members.
- Coaches: People that influence the economic/user buyer’s decision. Start with a broad view, identifying as many influencers and you can. Then focus in on the few most important ones.
Why organization and role are right for candidate:
Pinpoint how the organization and job meet the candidate’s needs, hopes and desires better than other opportunities. (Which requires understanding their other choices.) Look at how they order and balance the three drivers of happiness – doing good for others, doing things I’m good at and doing good for me:
- Good for others: Desire to help others.
- Good at it: Leverages their talents, knowledge, skills, experience and craft-level caring and sensibilities and helps them build knowledge, skills, experience and craft.
- Good for me: Recognition and rewards.
Why candidate is right for organization and role:
This is the answer to the candidate’s question, “What specifically, about me, led you to offer me the job?”
Motivation: Why they will love the job.
Strengths: Why they will do well in the job.
Fit: Match between organizational values and their preferences.
Candidate’s concerns: (Explicitly call out their concerns.)
Key Influencers’ needs, hopes, desires and concerns: (Learn about these by asking the candidate or by talking to influencers directly – if appropriate.)
Ways to alleviate concerns:
(Note if you can’t alleviate the concerns, the candidate should probably not accept your offer – which is better than having them take a job with insurmountable barriers.)
Verbal offer made ideally by their direct supervisor, live, face-to-face to make the candidate feel valued (By whom, when?):
Written offer delivered: (By whom, when?) (Make it feel official.)
Assistance with due diligence – items for follow up action:
Help the candidate mitigate three risks:
- Organizational: Give the candidate information about the organization and its sustainable competitive advantage - things like annual reports, the most recent strategic plan, and the like.
- Role: Set up conversations with any peers the candidate will have to work with interdependently so the candidate gets a better view of how their role fits with the organization.
- Personal: Share information you’ve gathered about the candidate – not necessarily all of it, but certainly information that highlights motivation, strengths and fit. If you’ve misread any of these, the candidate can correct you.
Follow up calls leveraging key players in and around your organization to help influence the candidate and their different buyers: (By whom, when?)
Other live meetings to alleviate concerns and drive messages about organization, role, candidate (Like family look-see visits and the like):
Target acceptance date:
Click here for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #777) and a summary of my book on executive onboarding: The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan.
