Leadership

CEO: Encourage Candidates to Turn You Down

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: July 5, 2008 / 7:49 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

The Find: If you want better quality employees more suited to your company culture, one CEO feels your best bet is to make it easy for job candidates to say no to your offer.
The Source: Summation, the blog of Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf.

The Takeaway: Zappos recently made headlines in the business press for offering $1,000 for new employees to quit. The company's goal (better customer service) is laudable, but Zappos' exact approach may be too extreme to be widely emulated. You want only the most committed employees for your company, and the ones that best suited to your company culture. So how can you ensure you hire them without resorting to bribery?

Auren Hoffman, CEO of Radleaf, has some ideas, all of which are variations on one theme: encourage candidates to turn you down. Among his suggestions:

"Don't use the offer as an opportunity to sell the candidate." Tell candidates to turn you down if they have doubts and to listen to their instincts. The offer is not the time for the hard sell.
Be completely honest about the company culture. Let the candidate get a sense of the company, warts and all. If you're frugal and unlikely to splash out on expenses, tell her. If unvarnished criticism is how business gets done, don't hide the truth.
"Tell the candidate your concerns about them... what they will need to improve upon to be a productive employee."
Don't give candidates a long time to make a decision - two days max. It shouldn't be that hard to decide to work for you.

The Question: A thought experiment: if you implemented these suggestions at your company, how would things change?

(Image of job offer letter by Egan Snow, CC 2.0)