It can be so frustrating for a business owner or leader when a really good candidate turns down a job offer. You’ve invested time in advertising, interviews and probably quite a few conversations internally. You think the candidate likes the role. You make what you believe is a good offer and then they say no. Sometimes they’ll tell you they’ve accepted another position or the salary wasn’t quite right. Sometimes you get a fairly vague explanation that it just didn’t feel like the right opportunity.
It’s very easy to assume the offer was the problem, but according to Carrie Johnston, Founder and Director of The CommsConnector, we sometimes look too late in the process.
Carrie and I discussed this in a recent episode of the Find Grow Keep podcast. She has spent more than 20 years working across recruitment, corporate communications and career strategy, so she gets to hear both sides of these stories. The version the employer tells her and the version the candidate tells her can be quite different.
For businesses using HR services for small business, recruitment is often approached as a series of practical steps: define the role, advertise it, interview people, make a decision and offer the job. All of those things matter. But there is something else happening at exactly the same time.
While you are assessing the candidate, they are assessing you.
And they’re often paying attention to things you didn’t realise you were showing them.
I’ve written before about taking a candidate-centric approach to recruitment. The basic idea is that recruitment needs to work for the candidate as well as the employer. You don’t automatically hold all the power simply because you have a job available.
But candidate experience isn’t only about making recruitment pleasant or making sure people receive an email at the right time. Candidates are gathering evidence about your organisation throughout the process.
They’re noticing whether people are prepared. They’re noticing whether different interviewers seem to agree about what the job actually is. They notice whether you do what you say you’re going to do, and whether the process seems considered or feels as though decisions are being made as you go.
One example Carrie shared was where a candidate had made it through to the final interview for quite a senior role. During the online interview, one of the executive leadership team members paused the conversation, turned off their camera and told the candidate they needed five minutes to read their résumé.
The candidate later turned the job down.
I can completely understand why! It was one moment in what was probably quite a substantial recruitment process, but that moment told the candidate something. Perhaps it suggested that their time wasn’t valued. Perhaps they wondered what it would be like to work for that executive. Perhaps it simply felt disrespectful.
Whatever their interpretation, the organisation was no longer only assessing whether this person was right for them. The candidate was thinking about whether they wanted to work with them at all. And once someone starts having doubts about that, a good salary or job title may not be enough to change their mind.
There’s another side to this that I don’t think we talk about enough. The recruitment experience doesn’t only influence whether a candidate wants the job. It can affect how well they perform during the selection process, which means it may affect your hiring decision as well.
Many years ago, when I was quite young, I went for an interview where I sat opposite a panel of three people at a completely transparent glass table. I can still remember how uncomfortable it made me feel. I became incredibly self-conscious and completely bombed the interview. Afterwards, the recruiter couldn’t understand what had happened because she had been so confident I would do well! The strange thing is that I could never have told someone beforehand that a glass table would bother me. I didn’t know it would.
Carrie had experienced something similar herself. She arrived for an interview expecting to meet two people in a Sydney office, walked into a huge boardroom and discovered someone else was joining remotely from overseas on a large TV screen. She hadn’t been told that was going to happen, and it threw her.
Neither of those businesses was necessarily doing anything deliberately unreasonable and that’s the interesting part.
We tend to design interviews around what is practical for us. We book the available room. We invite the people who need to be there. We fit it around everyone’s calendars.
But if we want to understand what somebody is really capable of, surely we also want to create an environment where they have a reasonable chance of showing us.
That doesn’t mean removing every bit of pressure from an interview. Interviews will probably always feel a little uncomfortable because something important is at stake.
It does mean considering whether something about the process is testing a candidate’s ability to do the job, or simply their ability to cope with the particular interview environment we have created.
Carrie has heard of senior candidates being interviewed in noisy food courts, and another candidate was asked to join a CEO on an outdoor walk because that was the only time the CEO could fit them in.
You can understand how these things happen. Everyone is busy and recruitment needs to keep moving.
But put yourself in the candidate’s position. Can they speak openly in a public place? Are they wondering who might overhear them? Can they concentrate while walking beside somebody they are trying to impress?
Sometimes something that is convenient for the employer makes it much harder for the candidate to put their best foot forward.
The environment you create can influence how comfortable a candidate feels and how well they are able to show what they can do.
Quite a few recruitment problems look like communication problems on the surface, but I think they often start much earlier.
Carrie talked about the questions she asks before she begins recruiting for a client.
They sound like very simple questions, yet I’ve seen businesses struggle with them too.
A position becomes vacant and everyone feels pressure to replace the person quickly. Or the business is growing and someone decides they need another manager. The job goes to market before the people involved have really agreed on what they are looking for.
Then candidates start meeting different people and hearing slightly different versions of the job.
One manager thinks the new person will be responsible for one area. Another thinks something else is the priority. A senior leader joins the process late and adds another requirement. Suddenly another interview or assessment is needed because someone realises there is something they forgot to test earlier.
From inside the business, these can feel like reasonable adjustments. From the candidate side, it can look like the organisation doesn’t know what it wants.
That’s why I agree with Carrie’s view that it can be better to wait before going to market if the brief isn’t clear. Taking a little longer at the beginning can save a lot of time later.
Sometimes businesses respond to uncertainty by adding more steps.
Another interview. Another stakeholder. An assessment. A presentation. Perhaps one final conversation with the CEO.
Carrie has seen professionals go through as many as seven interviews as well as assessments and testing. At the other extreme, she also gets concerned when organisations make significant hiring decisions after one conversation with one person.
So I don’t think the answer is simply to make recruitment shorter. The better question is whether every stage has a reason to exist.
What are you trying to learn at the first interview? Why does the candidate need to meet the next person? What will an assessment tell you that you don’t already know? Who actually has input into the final decision?
When those things are clear before recruitment starts, you can explain the process to candidates as well. They know what to expect and why they are being asked to do it.
There is a big difference between saying, “Our process has three stages because each one helps us assess something different,” and unexpectedly announcing after what the candidate thought was the final interview that there are another two people they need to meet.
Candidates have jobs, families and other commitments too. They may be organising meetings around work without telling their current employer why. They may be travelling or managing different time zones. A structured process respects that.
We also talked about AI, because it’s increasingly difficult to have a conversation about recruitment without it coming up.
There is an interesting tension here. Employers are frustrated by obviously AI-generated cover letters and applications. Candidates, meanwhile, are becoming frustrated by automated screening, AI-led conversations and recruitment processes where they rarely seem to interact with an actual person.
Carrie’s observation is that recruitment has become more transactional in some organisations as automation has increased.
I can absolutely see where AI and automation in recruitment it can make work easier. There is no reason somebody should spend hours doing administration that a system can handle well. But we need to be careful that we don’t automate the part of recruitment that actually helps somebody decide whether they want to work with us.
An automated update may be perfectly appropriate. An automated process that leaves somebody wondering for weeks whether anyone has actually looked at their application is different.
Carrie gave an example of a candidate who applied for a senior position with a major Australian organisation. She received an email congratulating her because she had been shortlisted for an interview.
Then she heard nothing.
She followed up and still heard nothing.
It’s difficult to reconcile that experience with whatever the organisation might say publicly about respecting people. Technology didn’t necessarily cause the problem. It just made it easier for the organisation to create a process where nobody took ownership of the human on the other side of it.
This is where recruitment and workplace culture become difficult to separate.
Businesses spend quite a lot of time thinking about employer brand. We talk about flexibility, development opportunities, values, benefits and culture.
But candidates are sophisticated enough now to know that every employer says they have a good culture. Carrie joked about the days when businesses could point to free lunches, ping-pong tables and other perks as proof that they were a great place to work. Candidates are looking for something more meaningful now.
One of the things we do with clients is use comments from their own employee engagement surveys in recruitment advertising. If employees are genuinely saying what they enjoy about working there, those comments are much more believable than simply telling candidates, “We have a fantastic culture.”
But even genuine employer branding only gets you so far. If your careers page says people are respected but an interviewer hasn’t bothered to read the résumé, the candidate is going to notice.
If you say communication is one of your values but repeatedly miss the dates you promised to provide an update, they’ll notice that too.
And if collaboration is important but the four people interviewing them seem to have four different versions of the role, that tells them something.
Candidates don’t experience your culture statement, they experience your people.
One of my favourite parts of the conversation with Carrie was when she talked about being honest about “the bad stuff”.
That sounds counterintuitive when you’re recruiting. You finally have a strong candidate sitting in front of you, so naturally you want to show them why they should join, but no workplace is perfect.
Perhaps a team has been through considerable change. Maybe the new manager is going to inherit some performance issues. There could be processes that need rebuilding or relationships that need some work.
Candidates need enough information to decide whether those are challenges they want to take on.
Someone may hear about a difficult situation and decide it isn’t for them. That can feel disappointing when you’ve spent time recruiting them, but I would much rather discover that before they join.
Another candidate might hear exactly the same information and think that is precisely the sort of problem they enjoy solving.
That person is coming into the business with realistic expectations.
I’ve seen this with clients more than once. The temptation is to make the role sound as attractive as possible because we don’t want to scare somebody away. But if there is something important about the role or team that they are going to discover during their first few weeks anyway, hiding it doesn’t really help either side.
You haven’t avoided the difficult conversation, you’ve simply delayed it until you’ve employed them.
For small and medium sized businesses, recruitment can feel very personal because there often isn’t a large internal talent team managing the process.
The owner, a senior manager or someone in the administration team may be trying to recruit on top of everything else they already do.
I can completely understand why processes sometimes evolve as they go.
But this is also where good HR services for small business can help. It doesn’t need to mean making recruitment more complicated. Often the value is in making it simpler because you’ve agreed on the important things before the first candidate walks through the door.
Before going to market, I would want the people involved to be able to answer:
None of those things are particularly complex, which is probably why they’re easy to skip.But when they’re clear, recruitment tends to become much easier for everyone involved.
When a good candidate turns down a job, you may never get the full explanation.
People are understandably careful. They don’t necessarily want to tell a prospective employer that one of its executives made them uncomfortable or that the recruitment process felt chaotic. It’s much easier to say they accepted another opportunity.
So when this happens, I think it’s worth looking beyond the offer.
Think about the process from the candidate’s side.
Were people prepared? Did everyone describe the role consistently? Did you explain what would happen next and then actually do it? Did anything change unexpectedly?
Were there stages in the process that existed because they genuinely helped you make a decision, or simply because another person wanted to be involved?
And did the candidate have a reasonable opportunity to show you who they were and what they could do?
Recruitment is always going to involve assessment. We need to make good decisions about who joins our businesses. But while we’re concentrating on assessing candidates, they’re forming their own view of us.
Sometimes they will remember the big things. Quite often, I suspect, they’ll remember something much smaller: the person who was prepared, the manager who took time to explain the role properly, the update that arrived when it was promised, or the interviewer who made them feel comfortable enough to have a useful conversation.
Those small things may tell them more about what it would be like to work with you than anything written on your careers page.
And sometimes, they’ll be the reason a really good candidate says yes.
If your recruitment process has grown a little messy, or you’re finding it harder than it should be to attract and hire the right people, we can help you work through what needs to change. Book a free discovery call and we can talk about what’s happening in your business and the practical HR support that would make the biggest difference.
Salary can certainly be a factor, but it isn’t always the main one. Candidates may turn down an offer because of poor communication, an unnecessarily long recruitment process, inconsistent information about the role, uncomfortable interactions with managers or concerns about the workplace culture they have observed during recruitment.
Candidate experience is the impression someone forms of your business throughout the hiring process, from their first interaction with the job advertisement through to interviews, communication, assessments and the final decision. Importantly, candidates are not only evaluating the role. They are also evaluating the people and organisation they may be joining.
Start by getting clear before advertising. Agree why the role exists, what success looks like, what capabilities are essential, who will be involved in the decision and what the recruitment stages will be. Then communicate that process clearly and keep candidates informed as you go.
There isn’t one right number. A senior or complex role may reasonably require more than one conversation, while other roles may not. The important thing is that every stage has a clear purpose. Adding interviews simply because different people want to meet the candidate can make the process longer without making the hiring decision better.
It can if automation replaces the human interaction candidates need to understand the organisation and feel that their application is being taken seriously. AI can be useful for administration and efficiency, but businesses still need people to take ownership of communication, relationships and hiring decisions.
