Ready, fire, aim, offer, wait, miss out!

This is the current "hiring style" of many of our largest clients in China.  Too many are not acting quickly on the candidates they choose to hire and, because of this, are missing out.

I had a good client lose a candidate today for a job they have had open for over one year.  The candidate met there criteria and they had the opportunity to make an offer the candidate would accept but they let internal bureaucracy slow down the process to the point where the candidate, faced with internal issues of his own, declined.

This is unacceptable and it is a sign of the times that even companies that are engaged in the China market are making novice mistakes when it comes to hiring.  Until companies here learn to act quickly on available candidates they will continue to miss out on talent.

Here are a couple things I tell my clients to do to increase their hiring speed:

Take a hard and honest look at your offering process and cut out any internal bottlenecks.  Too often I see clients who need to negotiate packages internally and worry over start dates that will never arrive if they do not stream -line this part of the process.  If you are bringing a candidate in for a final interview you, as a client, should be ready to make the best offer you can and let your staff know how much you can negotiate.  You should also know the candidates expectations and never make an offer that will be declined.  If there is an internal struggle every time your negotiators are at too low a level and you need to find a decision maker to do this job.  (In my opinion corporate recruiters in China are, in most cases, not trained in this part of the deal and need to be made aware of the decision making process in their own companies before they try to close a candidate.)  Internal recruiter should be a commissioned position.

Speed up the offer process and separate this from the "time to lose" metric everyone seems to worry about.  When you have a candidate that you want to hire in front of you you have entered a different phase of the recruiting process and should act accordingly.  Hire recruiters with a sense of urgency.  Too often at many companies here, the recruiters look at the hiring of candidates as an internal process rather that the deal making that it really is.  When a deal is on the table it is best to act on it as quickly as possible.

Until the organizational pain of missing out on available candidates reaches the appropriate level much of this is so much hot air. A change will only come to organizations when the pain of change is less than the pain of conducting business as usual. 

I have to get back on the telephone...