In a war for talent it is essential that you differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you want to wow top candidates (who have the potential to get multiple offers), you must act differently. Making same day offers will certainly get the candidates attention. 

What Is One Day Hiring?

One day hiring is not for all jobs or candidates. It is designed for people that we have pre-assessed and for those that clearly exceed the qualifications for the position. The premise of one day hiring is that if you build an effective decision process that responds in a day, you will capture superstars candidates before the competitor can even schedule an interview! In a war for talent, you need to differentiate yourself. You can’t gain a competitive advantage if you use the same tools and strategies as your competitors. One day hiring is deliberate strategy for improving both the quality and the number of hires by making hiring decisions on top candidates (and an offer) in one day!

Why Do One Day Hiring?

There is no evidence that slow hiring produces better hires. But there is clear evidence that the most desirable candidates are on the job market for “as little as a day.” The key is to identify ways to shorten the process of getting people hired.

Most hiring takes between 30 and 100 days, with the latter being a more common number. Delays in hiring can also cause managers (and candidates) to get frustrated and lose interest, because they see no immediate rewards of making hiring a priority. Interviewing and making an offer in one day is a strategy to make your firm appear decisive.

• Making an offer on the same day as the interview excites candidates and makes them feel important.
• Making a same day offer sends a clear message to the candidate that they are “special” and highly regarded.

Fast hiring is a great image builder. It reinforces your firm’s image as a rapid decision maker. How a firm acts during the selection process is also often seen as a reflection of how companies manage on the job The reason most hiring decisions take so long are varied but the primary reason is that most hiring systems were developed to hire “unemployed people” that have the time to go through an arduous process. However, employed people and top candidates have little time or inclination to go through a long drawn out process. This is especially true internationally or when coast to coast travel is required. These candidates can’t take two days off from their job (and “fib” to their boss about being away at the dentist for more than one day).

It’s time to face facts. In a low unemployment period… fast is better!

Slow hiring means vacancies. The cost of a vacant position can be extremely high. One computer firm calculates it at $7,000 a day and another at $1 million a week for key positions. Slow hiring delays product time to market and vacancies may frustrate other team members and increase their chances of them leaving also. One day hiring (ODH) gets hires on board faster.

Advantages Of One Day Hiring

• You get higher acceptance rates and better quality hires.
• Applicants may judge your firm by the efficiency of your hiring decision-making. Wasting people’s time irritates candidates and can show that you don’t respect them.
• The top candidates want you to make the decision quickly. These top candidates get frustrated easily. They don’t see why it takes so long and why there are so many time gaps in between interviews.
• Top candidates are often willing to make a decision pretty quickly because most have already pre-identified the firms they want to work for and pre-identified what they want in a job. They can be pretty quick to make the decision, if you give them the information they demand.
• Candidates who have multiple offers can get confused. If you can get to them quickly (when they decide to move on), they might decide right away and avoid the hassle of seeking out multiple companies.
• Managers get frustrated with the long process of hiring and therefore don’t spend a great deal of time on it. They will focus on it after they see the immediate results from a one day hire.

Disadvantages & Problems

• It might violate a “culture of inclusion” and offend members of the team (employees) by taking away their “vote”, if they can’t be present that day.
• Making a fast decision might result in a bad hire. It might result in a firm being fooled because of the brief time for assessment.
• It is difficult to develop hiring processes that work that quickly, although it can be done.
• HR is not always ready to make offers in one day due to legal issues or wanting to check references first.
• Background checks may take a while.
• Getting a decision in a consensus culture is sometimes a little difficult because it takes awhile to get everyone together to make a decision.
• There is a possibility if you hire people in one day they will say yes right away because of the excitement but later get buyers regret and eventually turn you down.

Companies Who Have, In Some Cases, Made One Day Hires

• Agilent
• HP
• Schwab
• Microsoft
• Cisco
• SUN
• Nortel

What Is One-Day Hiring?

One-day hiring is a deliberate strategy for improving both the quality and the number of hires by making hiring decisions on top candidates in one-day!

Steps In One-Day Hiring

One-day hiring means making a one-day decision–but not a quick and uniformed decision. The steps you need to take in order to make great and fast hiring decisions include the following:

Decide which jobs qualify as one-day hire jobs. One-day hiring is not for all jobs. It works best in the 10% to 25% of jobs that are really “hard to fill.” In these jobs there is always a shortage of talent, and the candidates that you do attract are likely to have multiple offers.

Qualify Managers. Not all managers are ready for one-day hiring. Only the top hiring managers that hire more than a dozen people a year (with good results) should be encouraged to do one-day hiring.

Pre-Identify Potential Candidates. It is unlikely that the top people in any field will conveniently be available on the day you have an open requisition. If you pre-identify the top talent and “up and comers” prior to the actual need, you automatically have more time to assess and to sell them. If you “personally court” them you can build a long term relationship with them and convince them to call you first when they begin to look.Offer rewards. Reward employees, ex-employees, customers, salespeople and “references” for acting as your talent scouts. Reward them both for supplying names and again if a candidate is actually hired.

Check your database. If you have a “who’s who” database or some other process of pre-identifying stars in your industry, you probably already have some information and assessments. If several people in your company have already independently identified candidates as a star at a conference, at a trade show, in a chat room or through some other way, you are half way there. By having two or three people independently identify them you are likely to have already realized that they are top talent.

Pre-qualify the potential candidates. Great one-day hiring starts with an essential first step: pre-assessment. Interviewing “strangers” or people you barely know through their resumes can be a disaster. If you know the candidate and their capabilities as early as possible before the actual interview day, you can screen them for their fit with the organization and you can begin the process of convincing them to say “yes.” You can pre-qualify people long before you need them, just like you can pre-qualify for a mortgage!

Set WOW instant hire criteria. Look at the selection criteria and identify the set of higher standards that, if they were met, would qualify a candidate for a one-day hire interview.

Use high success-rate sources. Top sources (like referrals from your top employees and ex-employees that were top performers) are unlikely to produce anything but one-day hire candidates. Referrals from top-performing employees are already pre-assessed. If an employee knows them and refers them, the odds of them not being qualified are reduced dramatically. If the referral program includes a requirement that employees also must pre-sell the firm to them, they might also come into the process partially convinced and definitely informed about the company and the job. If someone who is not an employee refers them (like a customer, key supplier or former employee ) the same would also likely be true.

Use remote assessment. Do as much remote pre-assessment as possible through reviewing personal Web pages, informal meetings at conferences, and through their comments on Internet chat rooms and list servers.

Pre-interview assessment of the selected final candidates.

Before you are ready to do some actual hiring, it’s time to do some final pre-assessment of those whom you want to invite in for a one-day hire. Some of the steps I recommend for pre-interview assessment include:Do a telephone or online interview.
Give them a simulation or a real company problem to solve prior to the interview (which is certainly the best way to assess people). In some cases, this can be done in advance and even on the Internet. Several firms have this process in place already.

• Offer online skill assessment “tests.”
• Do informal discussions over dinner, at golf, etc.
• Send them a questionnaire or email them some questions.
• Formally hire them for a “weekend” or as a consultant to assess how they actually work with your team.
• Ask your managers who have worked with these people previously (when they were a consultant, contractor, or even while in school or at another company) to assess them.
• Consider pre-checking their skills by calling people who are well known in the industry and asking them in a general way about candidates (pre-reference checking).

Pre-interview questionnaire.

A few days before the interview you can gather information that can speed up the one-day hiring process by sending them a pre-interview questionnaire.Pre-determine their job acceptance decision criteria by sending them a pre-interview questionnaire (or have them fill one out the day they come in). Ask them to prioritize (force rank) their job acceptance criteria. You might also ask them to fill out a “dream job” sheet or to write their own “offer letter.”

• Ask them to identify what they see as a great work environment, and what tasks or projects they would like to work on.
• Ask what frustrates them or what they don’t like.
• Ask what motivates them.
• And finally, ask how they like to be managed (i.e. what is the management style that works the best for them?).

By requiring them to force rank these things, you get some idea of what their interests and goals are.

Pre-interview realistic job previews.

Next, prior to any interview you want to give them a realistic job preview. The goal here is that if they know precisely what the job is like they will generally self-select out rather than make a mistake and pick something that won’t work. (You can show them pictures of the parking lot at six o’clock at night or you can have narratives written by co-workers about the work environment, the number of hours, about the management style, the projects, the stress level etc.) One of the best selection tools is allowing the candidates to use their own personal criteria to select out prior to the interview. Things that might concern candidates can be shown to them up front. This helps them understand what it is like at your firm so that you can narrow the list of candidates down to people who are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting everyone available on “interview day.”

You must make sure all interviewers are available on the day the candidates come in. Most of the delays in hiring are caused by scheduling issues because managers are unavailable for interviews. Generally this can be resolved by:

• Declaring “interview Friday” (or one Friday a month or the first Friday of the month). By setting aside a day just for interviews you eliminate some scheduling confusion.
• Interview day is just some fixed day that managers are told that they must be available for interviews on. Meetings might be cancelled or banned on that day (i.e. no meetings on Friday). This would free up the managers and ensure they are all available on that day.
• Rewarding managers financially for great hiring and for one-day hiring, their attendance will improve dramatically.
• Sharing calendars and the availability of teleconference sites online, so managers can remotely interview if they are on the road.

Things to do on the actual “one-day hire” day.

On the day the candidate comes in for an interview, there are a variety of things that can and should be done. They include:

• Assessing their fit with the firm’s culture and team.
• Selling the candidate on the position.
• Ensuring that their pre-assessed skill level was “basically” accurate. If they were clearly not a fit, they would not be hired at all. If the fit was weak they would not get a one-day offer but rather would be assessed over more time and perhaps made an offer later.

On the day of the interview, there are two basic approaches: You can bring the candidate in as part of a “group” at an “invited open house” where several people are brought simultaneously or they can be brought in individually.

• The candidate would normally be given a walk through the facility to meet the team in order to excite the candidate.
• You might add a rule that (especially if consensus or team decision is the mode) anyone not available on interview day does not get a vote.
• The candidate might be asked to fill out a preference form, indicating what motivates them and what excites them about a job. Managers are given that form before the interview so they know what the candidates expectations and preferences are.
• Interview questions should be assigned to individuals based on the skill of the interviewer. Engineers should only ask engineering questions and HR people should only ask HR questions.
• If multiple interviews are necessary, be sure to share the interview questions and the candidate’s responses, in order to minimize duplication.
• Normally, a scoring sheet would be available for each interviewer in order to force them to assess candidates only on the key required skills.
• You might ask the candidate to present their solution to a problem to better assess their skills.
• Interviews would be limited to a reasonable number (usually less than six) and the total time would be no more than an hour for each per interview.
• Group or team interviews certainly are helpful if you are trying to see if the team would be comfortable with them.

If they were in a “hard to hire” position, they had a significant number of the skills you needed, and they scored above a certain level in the interview, they would be declared an instant hire candidate. Other candidates would be taken for coffee while the managers met to assess the candidate.

Getting them to say yes on the same day.

Just like with a car dealership, you might ask the candidate, “What will it take to get you in that car?” The same is true here, “What would it take to get you to say yes to our offer?” One-day offers are great, but the icing on the cake is to get them to accept on the same day.

Just like a car salesperson, managers need to realize that if the candidate “walks out the door” without accepting, the chances of a “yes” diminish by as much as 50%! Some of the tools and strategies that you can use to get a same-day yes include:

• If before the assessment process the candidate has already been asked for their dream job criteria, what are their acceptance criteria?
• The candidate would be offered a bonus for making a fast decision. For example, a $5,000 sign on if they decided that day, $3,000 if the wait until the next day, and $1,000 if they waited a week.
• Managers might also get a bonus for great hiring or even making an offer in one-day. You want to excite them and encourage them to be more decisive.

If the candidate says yes, they would be encouraged to turn in their resignation letter the next day.
Offers can be contingent upon the formal checking of references, but generally offers would be made without completing references. Your knowledge of the candidate is already so strong that it would be unlikely that references would not check out.

Hire fast, fire fast.

Not all fast (or slow) hiring works. Smart firms (Cisco for example) develop a no-fault divorce process which allows a firm to “release” hires that didn’t work out within a reasonable time.

Other Tips

• Increase the amount of the referral bonus if the candidate is determined to be good enough for a one-day hire.
• Speed up the actual interviews. Ask new hires which questions turned them off and eliminate those. Track which answers predict job success (great answers result in top performing hires) and eliminate questions that add little value in predicting success on the job.
• Some managers are not fast decision makers. Designating a ODH team do all of your speed hiring may eliminate some of the problems with managers not being ready for this expedited process.

Measures And Metrics

Track offer acceptance rates, and see whether delays result in lower “acceptance” rates to your offers.

Do a satisfaction survey of candidates and managers to see which process results in the highest candidate-satisfaction rate.

Next, it would be important for HR to track if one-day hire decisions result in better hires! Meaning to check if one-day hires perform at a level better than normal “slow” hires.

Conclusion

Managers and HR people are sometimes reluctant to speed up the hiring process. But there is no law that requires you to take a long time to make decisions. However, there is some evidence that suggests the longer you take during low unemployment periods, the lower the quality of the hire will be. Top candidates are in such demand that they will drop out and accept other offers if you are slow in making decisions. It is very similar to being late in asking a popular person to the prom. The longer you wait to ask the top candidates, the less likely that you’ll get a yes to your offer and the more likely you’ll end up with an “ugly” date!