Do you know the person you’re about to hire?

A business came to us recently after two offers for the same role had failed.

On the face of it, there was nothing obviously wrong with the hiring process. They were finding credible people. Candidates were progressing through interview. Decisions were being made. Offers were going out.

But they weren't turning into hires.

As we talked through what had happened, one detail stood out.

At offer, the business had deliberately gone in below the candidate's stated salary expectation.

The reasoning was revealing.

“We wanted to see if they really wanted the job.”

It made me wonder about something much bigger than the number on the offer.

How can you reach the point of offering someone a job and still not know whether they want to join you?

We know a lot about candidates

Hiring has become considerably more structured.

That's largely a good thing.

We assess experience. We test technical capability. We involve relevant stakeholders. We introduce consistency. We record feedback. We try to make decisions based on evidence rather than instinct.

By the end of a thorough hiring process, a business can know an enormous amount about a candidate.

But I wonder whether, sometimes, we know more and more about the candidate while knowing less about the person.

What are they ambitious for?

What challenges them?

What do they want more of in their next role?

What are they reluctant to leave behind?

What do they want their career to look like in three or five years?

What has made them more interested in your opportunity as they've learnt about it?

And what has given them pause?

These things don't sit neatly on an interview scorecard. But they can matter enormously when someone is deciding whether to leave one job and join another.

A process can be thorough and still be too processy

There was a time when a “meet the team” often meant exactly that.

People spent time together. There might be coffee, lunch or drinks. Conversations wandered outside the job description. Candidates asked things they hadn't necessarily planned to ask. Both sides got a sense of the people involved.

I'm not suggesting we return to hiring based on who gets on well over a few drinks. More structured processes have brought important improvements in consistency and fair assessment.

But I do wonder whether we've lost something useful along the way.

Unstructured human contact.

Today, hiring can happen in very distinct stages.

One person screens. Someone else assesses technical capability. Another stakeholder looks at leadership. Somebody gathers feedback. HR handles another part of the process.

Everyone may do their job extremely well.

But who is getting to know the person?

Because it is perfectly possible for five people to meet a candidate and for nobody to come away understanding what that individual is really trying to do with their career.

The candidate is making a decision too

Most hiring processes are naturally designed through the employer's lens.

What do we need?

Can this person do it?

Do they have the right experience?

Will they work well here?

Can we afford them?

Do we want to hire them?

All perfectly reasonable.

But while the business is answering those questions, the person sitting opposite them is making a decision too.

Is this worth leaving for?

Will I learn anything here?

Do I trust the people I've met?

What am I giving up?

Is this actually better than staying where I am?

Where could this take me?

And those answers don't necessarily arrive fully formed at the beginning of a hiring process.

People learn things. They meet people. Their interest can grow. Something can trouble them. A conversation can change how they see the opportunity.

Sometimes the significant moments are obvious. Sometimes they're contained in a question someone keeps returning to, a concern that hasn't quite gone away or something about the opportunity they suddenly become much more interested in.

The signals may be there. But somebody has to be listening.

Then we reach offer

Eventually the business reaches its decision.

We want this candidate.

But suddenly there is uncertainty about the other half of the equation.

Do they want us?

And if that hasn't become clear during the process, the offer can start carrying far more weight than it should.

The number becomes a test.

The negotiation gets interpreted as a measure of enthusiasm.

A counter-offer suddenly changes everything.

The speed of an acceptance starts to mean something.

Yet by this point, the candidate isn't simply deciding whether the salary is acceptable.

They're deciding whether to leave something they know for something they don't.

That decision can contain colleagues, status, security, equity, flexibility, family, ambition, risk, another opportunity, a boss they trust or a future they aren't quite ready to walk away from.

A hiring process can capture every piece of assessment data it needs and still miss some of that.

Knowing someone takes time

We still spend a lot of time getting to know people.

We talk about what they're doing now, but also where they want to go. What challenges them. What they're ambitious for. What they value. What might make an opportunity worth exploring in the first place.

And those conversations don't stop because someone has entered an interview process.

That's important because people aren't static during a search.

What they think at the beginning isn't necessarily what they think three weeks later. Their understanding of the opportunity changes. So can their enthusiasm, their concerns and the things that matter most to their decision.

There is a difference between knowing whether somebody can do a job and understanding what might make them choose it.

And neither is particularly useful without the other.

The business that came to us had already found two people it was prepared to hire.

So finding candidates wasn't the whole problem.

What happened between finding them and failing to hire them was more complicated.

And that's often where the most interesting part of a search begins for us.

By the time an offer fails, it's tempting to look at the number, the negotiation or the counter-offer and decide that's where things went wrong.

Sometimes you have to go much further back.