Keeping Candidates Engaged After the Offer Has Been Accepted

This is the seventh blog post of a series titled Hiring for Engineering Managers. I plan to write a few posts on this topic since I'm incredibly passionate about how to hire for, and grow software engineering teams.

Congratulations! The candidate has signed the offer and they're going to join! .... in about 9 weeks time.

Does this sound strange? If you're accustomed to working in the US, it may be surprising that candidates would sign an offer for a company that they'll only join in 2 months time. However, labor laws in Europe sometimes dictacte very long notice periods. And while these are negotiable, this process is not always straightforward. Furthermore, candidates across the world might also request to take a good chunk of time off inbetween jobs and depending on who has the leverage in the negotiation process, it may happen to you that someone will sign an offer 2+ months before they actually join.

So what?

I believe it's important to keep candidates engaged during this period. Of course, it's certainly not something that should keep you up at night as a hiring manager (I've written about more important things before). However, it's so easy to keep people engaged that it is certainly worth the effort.

But why?

The reason why should be fairly obvious. A signed offer does not guarantee that someone will definitely join your company/team. And this likelihood is lower the longer the period of time goes between the offer letter is signed and the new person is expected to join.

In addition to this, as the hiring manager, you should also ensure that people will join with as much excitement about the role as possible. The goal is for new hires to come in full of new ideas and energy, so that you maximize their impact over their "honeymoon phase".

If you can get people to stay intelectually engaged and very eager about their future role, you're increasing the odds that they'll be successful in your team. Candidates who are excited about their future role are also more likely to prepare ahead by studying a new programming language, or doing anything else that will give them an edge when they join.

And how?

Compared to the hard work of sourcing people, having an amazing interview loop, and putting in a lot of time into recruiting, it's actually very easy to keep future hires excited.

The first technique I've learnt over the years is to get as many people who were on the interview loop as possible to simply email the person to congratulate them on the offer, and to show their availability to any questions the new person might have. This is easy and incredibly effective.

The second practice I've adopted has been to hop on a few quick calls and trade some emails back and forth with people who haven't yet joined. These can and should be super casual (remember: they're not employees yet!). The goal with these encounters is to keep people intelectually curious. Just share with them what's going well, and what challenges lie ahead. And maybe you can get them to brainstorm with you on some interesting issues.

Finally, you don't have to take all of the load here — leverage your team! In the past, I've asked others to take on some of these calls with people who were about to join, and that's worked out quite well. Besides, whenever possible, invite future hires to team building activities such as offsites, casual lunches, etc.

I need to thank a few key people who've showed me "the way" here during my career (Carl, Joaquin, James — I'm thinking of you!). I've been paying attention and I like to think that I've gotten much better at the entire recruiting process, especially as I now see recruiting as an all-encompassing effort which stretches beyond simply "getting" candidates and getting them to sign offer letters.

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