You’re speaking to your dream candidate and they are perfect. You can feel their positivity through the phone, they’re passionate about your cause and they’re determined and driven to work hard to meet targets, maybe they even have fundraising experience, bonus!
You sell them the job, you promote your travel trips, Friday night socials, salary sacrificing, performance bonus and they are “super excited”.
You tell your team about ‘Ben’, the amazing candidate you have just spoken to, who is 100% getting the job and going to be your next best fundraiser.
You send Ben a reminder text, he responds, “I can’t wait to meet you”
Your interview starts and finishes and Ben is nowhere to be seen, out of desperation and still holding on to the high hopes you placed on his interview, you call him, you give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he couldn’t find your office, it’s kind of awkward to find sometimes, or maybe Melbourne’s public transport is on strike.
Finally, you accept, Ben isn’t coming.
Sound familiar?
So what went wrong? You built great rapport, you sold the job and you both seemed to enjoy the conversation, what makes a perfect phone interview turn into a total letdown?
It could be as simple as Ben found another job, got busy, couldn’t be bothered or maybe even read a bad review online about working with you. But more often than not when we, as an external service contact interview no-shows, the reason for not showing comes down to the same thing.
You oversold the job.
Selling the job is an important part of the fundraising recruitment process and one thing fundraising recruiters do well is promoting a lot of the amazing opportunities candidate’s will get from working for charity, but in a candidates mind, sometimes this faultless promotion can result in a sense of insecurity, a sweeping fear of panic, “Can they even do this job?”, “Are they a strong enough contender for this opportunity?” When we feel as if we will certainly fail, we don’t continue, it’s not in our nature.
So don’t get irritated, get mindful, let your enthusiasm in Ben be known to him, assure him, as you did with your team, that you think he is a brilliant candidate, it’s often as simple as closing your conversation by saying something along the lines of, ‘I can’t wait to find out how your interview goes, I’m sure you’re going to be a star!’. This small act of reassurance is enough to make Ben feel confident that he stands a chance.
So when you feel someone is great, let it be known, your show rates will thank you for it.