Kyle is a great candidate and he’s been very successful with the kinds of things he’s done…he is skillful and has been lucky in the jobs he has had to have caught companies and markets at the right time… unfortunately, though, his success has gone to his head
Our client was interested in Kyle after the first meeting and wanted to pursue him… Kyle’s attitude was, “well, I might be interested and I might not, let’s see what they’ve got…”
He made it through a second and third round of interviews, performing very well… then he starts playing “hard to get.”
The organization tells us they’re interested in making him an offer… Kyle put them off and started saying things like, “well, let me take a look at exactly what I’m giving up in my present job and get back to you about what it’s going to take for me to leave…” our client’s attitude was, “wait a minute! You knew what our offer was going to be all along, as we explained the money in the first meeting that we had…”
Kyle explains to us, his recruiter, that he knows… we’re not sure how he get this ideda.. but that he knows they can make a much better deal with him than they said they would… he then postpones a second conversation that he was supposed to have with them about an offer… he then calls us and tells us the only way he would consider the job would be to get a $15,000 salary greater than what they said they were willing to pay as well as a sign-on bonus of at least $10,000…
Because of our experience, we had two other candidates in the queue with the company, realizing that anything can happen… we explained to Kyle that it just wasn’t realistic to expect the company to do what he was asking, because the market is such that they didn’t need to do that… Kyle’s attitude was, “well I’m that good and that’s what it’s gonna take!”
We explained to the client that we just didn’t think it was going to work out with Kyle. He hadn’t looked for a job in a number of years, he just wasn’t aware of the reality of this market and he was asking for more than what we thought was fair… we didn’t want to vilify Kyle because we wanted to be sure the door might be opened for him somewhere down the line… Kyle got his nose out of joint and was rather indignant about the fact that our client just wasn’t interested in this proposition… there was no reason for them to be… Kyle was good but he was more of a “legend in his own mind” than he was valuable to our client…
One of our other candidates was offered the job and accepted with grace and style… the lesson is that no one has any intrinsic value… a candidate’s value in the job search is relative to the market and other candidates that might be available… playing hard to get by coming up with ridiculous demands won’t get you hired… get a job offer, do it or don’t, but don’t let it go to your head…
