a tailored negative sell in the job offer

For almost any role you hire for, your new person is going to need to grow and adapt to excel. This is true if they’re an insider who knows your culture backwards and forwards. It’s true if you’re hiring an elite veteran with a glittering resume. It’s true if the job has the exact same title and responsibilities as the one this person just held somewhere else or was just doing as an independent contractor.

Ben has long touted the value of early, assertive “negative sells” in interview processes. In organizations he leads or coaches, the negative sell often comes early, even in an opening phone screen. The recruiter tells the candidate what current employees, even the high-performing culture bearers, find challenging, unpleasant, and hard about working here. Candidates get an early, no-judgement opportunity to opt out if this isn’t the set of challenges they want.

I have found it helpful to bring the negative sell back at the end of the process, when you’re making the offer to your top candidate. By this point in the process, you’ve gathered more information about them and they know more about you. Hopefully, you’ve put them through the paces of some kind of true-to-life scenario and talked to other people who have managed them or worked with them. This should give you a sense of what their growth and adaptation will need to look like for them to excel in the job. 

It can be tempting, once you’ve made it all the way through a multi-step process, to shift into pure sales mode. You bring down the opaque shield of professionalism and express unbounded enthusiasm for this person. You try to win them over. 

Don’t do this – or at least, don’t do it without offering the clear, tailored negative sell. That negative sell usually sounds like this, 

“We’re really excited about you because [reasons x,y,z]. We believe you can be great at this and we’re enthusiastic about working together. We’re offering you the job! This might be an unorthodox offer but we don’t want you to accept on the spot. Don’t take this job unless you’re excited about getting excellent at [growth areas a, b, c]. That’s a non-negotiable element of this offer.”

-eric

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