Kimberley Chesney, CPC, Prime Management Group,NPA 7525
How many times have you been asked to provide more resumes so your client can make a hiring decision? As annoying as it may be, we have to look at this from the client’s point of view. How you react to this request should be dependent on how well you know your client.
First of all you have to establish if they are the sole decision maker or if they are part of a group. Who are the other players and how do they make decisions? If they need to make decisions by collecting more and more data, then it is good to provide them with more! Recently we had this happen and we had to take a step back and look at what was really going on. As discouraging as it was, we realized that the current hiring manager was an engineer who often suffered from analysis paralysis. Even though his ideal candidate was in front of him, he needed to be sure, so we gave him (through human resources) another candidate who clearly couldn’t hold a candle to our original one. Bingo. that’s all he needed to satisfy his need for more information before he could make a decision! In came the offer, and everyone lived happily ever after!
Then there was another client…. they asked for more candidates, but we knew that this would just confuse them. They didn’t have the same personality as the former client – and we knew it! So we held a hard line with them making them see that if they wanted to see more candidates they would lose this one. It did help that our candidate was being courted by another opportunity. That was all our client needed to push him over the edge and make the decision.
What we have come to learn after many years is that taking the time to know your client has tremendous payoffs. Even if it’s a new client and you don’t quite know them, there are ways to decipher how they make decisions. For example, you can ask them, “How many steps does your company usually go through before they make a hiring decision?” “Walk us through three recent examples” This type of information will prove valuable as you are trying to close the placement.
So the quick answer to, “Are more resumes better?” is, “It depends!”
Here’s to more placements and quicker closes in 2009!