"Can I accept this job offer upon your behalf"

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In this issue:

• The psychology behind the question

• Why we ask this question

• Action steps

“Always be closing”

From every sales movie since the 80’s to your sales manager today, chances are you’ve heard this phrase quite a few times.

It’s extremely corny, but it’s the right mindset to have.

It doesn’t matter if you’re agency or in-house, every recruiter needs to be gaging the candidate’s interest at every level of the application lifecycle.

While a full guide on how to do this is in the works for a later date, this edition goes over how & why asking this specific is important to implement in your process now.

The point of this question isn’t to try to sound like a sleazy salesman. In fact, that’s the last thing we want to be.

It’s about being a partner to both sides - candidate & client - getting the right information from the candidate to relay over to the hiring manager to come up with a winning outcome for everyone. We want everyone to play on the same team and partner with one another to make this thing work.

The last thing we want to have happen is for someone to decline an offer for something we could have influenced and had the client come to a compromise. When this happens, it’s our fault and we didn’t do our job right.

So we want to prevent this by being as direct - yet polite - as possible.

The psychology behind the question

Let’s paint a picture.

You found the perfect candidate for a role you’re working. Every step of the way you gauge their interest level and they confirm it. They make it to the final round interview, you debrief them, and they say they’re interested in the role. You sync with the manager, the offer is extended. Hooray!

But the candidate hits you with “I need to think about it”. And then, after the fact, they come at you with a list of demands in order to accept the offer.

Sound familiar?

Every recruiter’s been through this.

You can press candidates all you want on their interest and activity, but these guys are smart. They’re not always going to be up front and transparent with you. And honestly in this market I don’t blame them with all the horror stories of offers getting pulled out there.

You have to assume, at some point, something can and will go wrong (yes, even after you did your job weeding out red flags up front and ABC’ing them throughout the process").

And that’s where “Can I accept this offer upon your behalf” comes into play.

Again, let’s assume you’ve weeded out all red flags/ABC’d every step until the final round. You still want to press them about their interest level/outside activity BEFORE you extend the official offer. Even if you get the official offer, you still do the pre-close before extending it.

Here’s why: Once you extend the offer, and they have outside activity or a list of demands in order to accept, they have more leverage than you.

They have the offer, now they can hang it over their head asking for more.

Instead, we want to ask this question before the official offer, so there’s still the possibility that if they ask for too much, it may sway the final decision from the manager into another candidate’s direction.

Why do we specifically ask this question?

Because you already asked “what’s your interest level in the role”, “what other activity do you have going on”, “Where does this rank compared to everything else” blah blah blah.

1: It’s a way to ask the same type of question with the same type of motive in a different form.

By asking different questions in different forms, you may extract different answers. If the answers don’t line up, you have some digging to do.

2: It subtly puts them on the spot, without being too controversial.

They can’t just go through the motions and say “yea interested”. This is going straight for the commitment, now or never.

We go straight to the “yes” or the “no” which is what we want. And depending on what they say, we diagnose from there.

3: It prevents us from getting blindsided if they end up asking something more .

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather get all the pain points up front before the offer vs. getting blind sided while extending the offer with a list of demands.

Doing it before extending an offer allows you to compose yourself between that call, to the call to the manager, to the call back to the candidate.

You’re able to take a step back, compose yourself, get the information and leverage you need to go back to the candidate vs trying to figure out everything all at once out of nowhere.

Action Steps For Yes and No

If they say yes, you’re obviously in the clear.

If they say no, or hesitate for a period of time, then we need to dig in as to why.

The importance of doing this NOW rather than AFTER the official offer is extended is because they won’t have the official offer in their hand to use as leverage to negotiate terms.

If you wait until after the offer to to do this, they can hang this over your head. If you do this before the offer, there’s still a chance if they ask for too much if can go away, so the leverage is mitigated.

So when they say no, you should say something along the lines of “so what’s preventing you from accepting this offer?”

From there, there are two responses:

1: The transparent response:

Which they’ll tell you what’s really going on. Other offers, certain pain points they noticed at some point during the process, trying to negotiate better terms, etc.

If you get a transparent response, that’s a good thing because they’re being open and honest with you.

Sure, ideally this happened during the interview process but better late than never. By being transparent, they still show interest which still gives you a good chance to close this out.

Assuming their asks are reasonable, they’re being honest with you now because they want this offer in some shape or form and want you to get it for them, it’s just a matter of getting better terms and everyone compromising somewhere.

2: The “I need some time to think about it”

Now, it’s perfectly fine for someone to need time to think about it. After all, it’s a life altering event changing/starting new jobs.

But, what might be concerning if they don’t tell you any interest level/pain points they need addressed while their taking their time.

So we want to try to find this out by saying something like:

“I completely respect your time. Is there anything that would prevent you from taking this offer? The last thing I want to have happen is you reject this offer for X reason, when I could have helped influence it had I knew about it.”

Which is completely true. If someone’s looking for an extra day from home, better travel arrangements, more money, whatever the case may be, sometimes managers are willing to make exceptions for exceptional people.

If they end up giving you the info needed to go back to the manager, great, then you can work with them to figure out if there can be a compromise to make this thing work.

If they don’t want to give you any info, then the only choice is to fly blind.

We do not pressure or press them.

There is a fine line trying to dig out information and push for a positive outcome for everyone vs. being a sleazy salesman.

The point of this exercise is to draw out the information to make everyone a winner, not to try to back someone into a corner (which never works out anyway).

At the end of the day, it’s their life and they need to make the best decision for them. You know the motto - where there is activity, there is deal flow. If you’re over reliant on just one deal where you get worked up on 1 candidate that may reject you’re offer, we got bigger problems to look at.

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