We may have long been in a job market that puts the most talented candidates in an advantageous position in terms of choosing from job offers, but is that represented in your hiring team’s approach to interviews?

The way you interview candidates should be central to your direct sourcing strategy, and in particular, it is more important than ever these days to craft a compelling sales pitch.

Your passive prospects won’t just arrive at the interview expecting to have to make the case for you to consider them – you will also have to convince them that your company is the right one for them, and is offering the right role.

It’s not about becoming completely sales-oriented

Balance is the key when you wish to craft an interview approach that will ‘sell’ your opportunity to a candidate – you only need to spend a fraction of time on any overt ‘selling’.

The ‘80/20’ rule is a good one here. Aim to spend about 80% of the interview asking the candidate all of the questions that you need to ask them.

If it becomes clear that the candidate is a potentially highly suitable one, devote the remaining 20% of the time to starting to position and ‘sell’ the vacancy.

The right preparation is also all-important

You shouldn’t just give the same generic sales pitch of your role to every person who walks into the interview room. After all, if they’re passive candidates, you have the unenviable task of trying to persuade them to leave a job in which they may be perfectly comfortable.

So, target their motivations – and peruse their CV and research their work history to get a sense of what those motivations are. Does the candidate seem to be attracted to certain kinds of challenges? Are they drawn to specific work environments, values or firms with a prestigious reputation?

With a few well-placed questions in the interview, you can convert your hunches about the candidate’s motivations into certainties that you can then use to tweak your in-interview selling techniques.

Build goodwill with the candidate by taking an honest approach

Yes, you may be trying to ‘sell’ your company and vacancy to the candidate, but if you don’t present yourself and your intentions in an honest and transparent way from the start of the interview, it’ll be much more difficult to develop that all-important mutual trust.

We say “all-important”, because such mutual trust is what lasting and fruitful employment relationships are built on – and even the most subtle messages can make a difference to your ability to achieve this.

So, when a great candidate appears, don’t be ambiguous about your interest – be upfront about it.

Take a hands-on approach to the construction of the best sales pitch to candidates, and you can expect so much more success from whatever direct sourcing strategy you deploy for talent acquisition – whether or not you do so with the assistance of Webrecruit Ireland.

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