I want to know what the job is really going to be like, day to day. What is the day to day? Don't try to sell me the job. Just tell me the truth up front. Really. Please.

—Twentysomething

Today's talent wars are different from those of the past. Managers today are savvy enough to know that hiring one very good person is better than hiring three or four mediocre people. When the labor pool is tight, that means competing with other employers to attract the very best applicants. The winners in this talent war attract enough candidates that they can be selective in choosing whom to hire. Even so, some managers in a position to be selective still find that when hiring new young talent, they too often choose the “wrong person.” In fact, the most common complaint I hear from managers when it comes to hiring young workers today is that they often feel blindsided by a good hire gone bad in the very early stages of employment.

What's going wrong in the hiring of today's young talent?

Employers eager to attract the best are too often delivering the wrong messages to the wrong people at the wrong times.

Because young talent is perpetually in greater demand than supply—in most segments of the labor market—employers desperate to fill open positions often make the mistake of turning recruiting into an elaborate sales pitch. The problem is that prospective employees get the wrong idea about what the job they are applying for is really going to be like. Thus, the new employee is quickly disappointed that the job is not as advertised. In months, sometimes just weeks, the person is unhappy and frustrated. The most common thing we hear from the new young team members is, “That's not what they told me in the interview.”

Employers seeking to be highly selective—even amid a talent shortage—have to worry about losing people if their hiring process is too slow or cumbersome: lots of hoops and delays.

To win today's competition for the most talented young employees, you need to develop a systematic effort to find the right candidates, develop methodical recruiting campaigns anchored in powerful messaging, implement rigorous selection techniques, and then get new staff members in the door on day one excited about the actual experience that awaits them. That is the challenge.

Diversify Your Sourcing

On the higher segments of the talent spectrum, among specially trained and credentialed personnel—for example, in health care, high tech, and accounting, but also in the building trades, agriculture, commercial driving, and on and on—demand consistently outpaces supply. One understaffed nurse manager told me, “We can't exactly go over to [a retail store] and recruit their cashiers to become nurses, right? We need to compete for the limited pool of people who have made the commitment on their own to get that training.” In this situation, employers know exactly where they can find young candidates: among the graduates of lengthy education and certification programs. But competition is fierce among employers seeking the best and the brightest newly minted professionals. The employers on the high end need to set themselves apart so that the best young people will want to work for them instead of another comparable organization. To underscore this point, a recent graduate put it best: “I'm at the top of my class, so I have my pick of firms I can work for. So why should I come work for you? You'll have to convince me. I don't want to brag, but I've got a lot of offers already.”

This dynamic is evident anywhere special training and credentials are required, including commercial driving and the building trades,

On the lower end of the labor market—for example, retail stocking clerks, cashiers, cleaners—employers have the advantage of recruiting among a much wider pool of potential employees. If you are not limited to hiring people who have completed training and certification programs, then you can go over to a retail store and try to recruit their employees to come work for you. The problem on this end of the spectrum, employers often tell us, is that the quality and skills of employees in their labor pool are not up to the level they need. One warehouse manager told me, “I don't need to hire rocket scientists, but I need to hire people who show up for work on time and can read and write. Because of geography, the nature of the work we do, and competition from other employers who have more to offer, I can't even hire mediocre performers. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here just to get bodies in the door.”

Whether you are hiring people on the high end or the lower end of the talent spectrum, my guess is that you need to increase your supply of new job applicants. How can you do that?

The first places most managers and organizations go to look for new applicants are the very same places where they've found successful hires in the past. The idea is simple: what's worked for you in the past will probably work for you again. We call this successful hire profiling. In general, this is a good way to start your talent search. So, if you haven't been tracking where your successful hires are coming from thus far, you should start now.

But one potential downside of successful-hire profiling is that recruiting from the same sources over and over again can lead to a homogeneous population of employees over time and thus undermine your efforts to develop a diverse workforce. The other potential downside is a bit more obvious: if you are competing for a limited supply of talent, you had better diversify your sources of potential candidates so you can increase your applicant pool.

If step one in a good sourcing process is to look in the same places where you've found successful hires in the past, then step two is to look in places that should be good sources but from which you have not found successful people in the past. If you've sought new employees only from top schools in the past, but these sources are not yielding enough applicants now, perhaps it's time to consider looking at top students from second-tier schools. If you've poached talent only from the local big-box retailers in the past, maybe you should consider searching in restaurants. If you've been looking for people on line, maybe you should try a new venue. If you've been narrowing your search by one set of criteria, maybe you should change some of the criteria and open up some new possibilities. And so on.

What are some other ways to widen your pool of candidates?

Why Your “Employer Story” May Need an Overhaul

“We are considered one of the most powerful brands in the world when it comes to consumer markets,” said a senior executive in a global beverage company. “That blue chip branding has always carried over to our brand as an employer. Isn't branding a big part of recruiting? Shouldn't that blue chip brand carry some weight with this new generation when they are looking for a job? Isn't that enough to get them in the door?”

The answers are yes, yes, and maybe. Yes, branding is a big part of recruiting. Whether you are a big global brand or a smaller local brand, if young people know who you are, trust your reputation, and believe you have plenty of resources, often that's enough to get them in the door. But maybe you should hope that branding does not get them all the way in the door. Our research shows that some employers' brands are so famous and “sexy” (think entertainment industry, sports, media) that young people may flock to them—but they may do so for the wrong reasons. In the early stages of their working lives, young people—read, maybe, “anyone”?—may be attracted by the glamour, excitement, and fantasy attached to the brand, but those unrealistic expectations are often dashed when they discover that what awaits them on the other side of the door is a workplace in which they are expected to do lots of work. This abrupt realization often leads to a disappointing and unsuccessful employment experience. That's why it's critical to build your brand as an employer, on its own terms, right alongside your brand in the marketplace. Just as your brand in the marketplace is built on the value proposition you offer to consumers, your brand as an employer must be built on the value proposition you offer to employees.

Define Your Value Proposition in Language That Resonates

Too many employers today are still offering the same long-term career opportunities, together with traditional, old-fashioned rewards they've been offering for decades: slow steps up the organization's ladder, six-month reviews, annual raises, and other standard benefits. “The recruiting message at our firm is crafted by the corporate office with a recruitment advertising firm,” one manager in a large consulting firm told me. “The recruiting materials we give interviewees are practically the same ones I got twenty years ago when I started, just prettier. I think some of the senior partners just can't let go of the old ‘pay your dues, climb the ladder.’ It was always a churn system. Most people get churned out. The tough ones survive and keep moving up. In the long run, you'll get taken care of.” If that's your message, then you better wonder why young workers are coming to work for you because it has nothing to do with your message. If all you have to sell are one-size-fits-all career paths and rewards that don't vest until several years in the future, your value proposition and recruiting message will not be compelling to today's young people. For young workers, traditional rewards are merely the threshold test.

What's confusing to many employers, however, is that young applicants often appear very concerned about these long-term opportunities. The executive at the beverage company told me that often new young employees are eager to learn about their traditional career track and benefits. She explained, “We have a pretty well-defined career track. Of course, some people go much further or much faster than others, but in general, it's pretty well defined. We describe this track to applicants in the interviews and then again when we make the offers. Usually, they'll ask detailed questions about it: What can they expect in five years, ten years, fifteen years? And they seem to understand it all. But eighteen months after taking the job, they walk out the door. When they level with us, they complain they did not get what they wanted fast enough. Why are they asking us these detailed questions in the interviews about five years and ten years and fifteen years?”

So … What's Going on Here?

Of course, your new young workers are curious to know where they'll be in the organization if they were to stay for five, ten, or fifteen years. But this is just-in-case information. Just in case they get stuck in your system, they want to know how that is likely to play out.

Another manager asked me, “Are they just humoring us?” Maybe so. Young people in the workforce today are savvy enough to know that hiring managers are concerned with retention of new employees and that they should try to express interest in staying for at least some reasonable period of time. What's reasonable? Young people usually assume that whatever time frames you are using to discuss the position must seem reasonable to you, so they mirror that language.

One Twentysomething had this to say: “No company says on their website, ‘Come work for us for a little while, and let's see how it goes.’ None of them say in the interviews, ‘Well if you work here for six months or a year, it would be fine.’ It would be stupid for me to talk to them like that. I won't say, ‘Well, I'm probably only going to stay here for a year until my boyfriend graduates, so hire me.’ I mean, who knows? If things are going great for me at the company and it works out for me in terms of my life, then sure, I might stay. So why shouldn't I ask about the long term?”

When it comes to job opportunities, our research shows that most young workers look at both the long-term and short-term prospects. They are interested in figuring out what role you might play in their life story, including the long-term possibilities. Since longer term is the language spoken by most employers, asking questions about the long-term opportunities allows applicants to compare employers more easily. Often when applicants ask questions about short-term opportunities, employers have a hard time speaking that language. And sometimes applicants find that asking those questions turns off potential employers and leaves the applicant without a job offer. They don't usually make that mistake twice.

Still, what really concerns most young applicants—first and foremost—are the short-term opportunities and rewards. If you want to speak to them in a way that separates your job offer from the others right now, you have to talk about right now. You have to talk about what you have to offer them today, tomorrow, next week, this month, the first six months, and the first year. If you want your recruiting message to attract them, then you need a recruiting message that speaks to their real concerns.

Of course, every applicant is unique and comes with his or her own concerns to the table. They want different things from different jobs at different times. In our research, we've learned that what work means to most people at any given time changes depending on what's going on in their lives.

Here is the model for most young people at the early stages of their working lives:

• Sometimes they want to hide out and collect a paycheck. I call this a safe harbor job. There are no upsides for the employer. Don't let anyone in the door who expects to hide out and collect a paycheck.
• Sometimes they are taking stock and trying to figure out what they really want to do next. I call this a way station job. The one potential upside here for the employer is that the Millennial may well try to build a record of accomplishment working for you so he or she will be able to trade that success for the job he or she really wants.
• Sometimes they look at work as a place to hang out with friends. I call this a peer group job. The potential upside for the employer is that they may really look forward to coming to work. The downside is that their social relations will be their primary focus.
• Sometimes they find work that aligns with their deep interests and priorities. I call this a passion job. The upside for the employers is that they will bring energy and enthusiasm to the work. The potential downside arises when the work part of work makes the passion seem more like a grind.
• Sometimes they see a job as an opportunity to work like crazy for a period of time with the chance of a giant payoff. I call this a big gamble job. The upside is that they will work like crazy. The downside is that if they lose confidence in the likelihood of the giant payoff, they might “strip-mine” the organization for any resources they can find—training opportunities, business contacts, paper clips—to try to give themselves a return on what starts to look like a bad investment.
• Sometimes what they value in a job is an unusual opportunity to meet an idiosyncratic need or want. It might be to work a very particular schedule, or work with particular individuals, or work in a particular location, or learn a particular skill, or do a particular task, or engage in some nonwork activity (sleeping or reading or watching television) on the job. I call this a needle-in-a-haystack job. The upside is that as long as they value that needle in a haystack need or want and you are able to provide it, they won't leave.

The best case is when a young applicant is looking at the job as a chance to make an impact while building themselves up with your resources. They hope to learn, grow, and collect proof of their ability to add value. I call this a self-building job. As long as you keep supporting their self-building, this will bring out their best for the most sustained period.

• The trick for hiring managers and organizations is creating a recruiting message that will attract employees who are looking for a self-building job.

There are eight self-building factors to emphasize and build your message around:

1. Performance-based compensation. Financial compensation must be competitive in the marketplace. But much more important than the actual salary, compensation that is not limited by any factor other than their own performance.
2. Flexible schedules. They want to know that as long as they are meeting goals and deadlines, they will have some control over their own schedules. The more control, the better.
3. Flexible location. As they are meeting goals and deadlines, some control over where they work. To the extent that working in a particular space in a particular building is required, they want to know that they will have some power to define their own space to their liking.
4. Marketable skills. Formal and informal training opportunities are important, and new employees want to be assured that they will be building skills and knowledge faster than they will become obsolete.
5. Access to decision makers. Opportunities to build relationships with important leaders, managers, clients, customers, vendors, or coworkers.
6. Personal credit for results achieved. They want to put their own names on the tangible results they produce.
7. A clear area of responsibility. Young people want to know that they will have 100 percent control of something, anything, so they can use that area of responsibility as their personal proving ground.
8. The chance for creative expression. Young people want to have a clear picture of the parameters that will constrain their creativity so they can imagine the terrain in which they will have freedom to do things their own way.

Self-building jobs are those that give new young workers the chance to build themselves up—in the short run—using any combination of the eight elements above. If you can offer opportunities like these, then you will have a compelling message.

But don't try to sell young applicants a bill of goods. Don't promise them these things if you can't offer them. Overselling the job to is a big mistake. If you sell them a self-building opportunity falsely, they will quickly turn the job into a safe harbor or a way station or a peer group experience. Instead, clarify expectations at the outset by answering the fundamental questions that are really on their minds: “Exactly what will you expect me to do today, tomorrow, next week, this month, next month, and the month after that? And exactly what do you have to offer me in the form of financial and nonfinancial rewards today, tomorrow, next week, this month, next month, and the month after that?”

Answer those questions in terms that speak to their real concerns and tell it like it is.

Be Very, Very Selective

The point of crafting a compelling recruiting message is to attract a sufficiently large applicant pool from which you can choose selectively. The biggest mistake hiring managers make is continuing the “attraction campaign” until the job candidate has accepted the job and sometimes until the new employee is already at work. We call this “selling candidates all the way in the door.” Why is this a problem? Because in an effort to sell, sell, sell their job to a candidate, sometimes companies make promises they can't keep—or sell the job to the wrong candidate.

The result of selling candidates all the way in the door is often that many new employees quickly begin to experience a form of buyer's remorse: “This job is not what they sold me!” They may be disappointed and unhappy and yet remain in the job, sometimes for months on end. And this is the number-one cause of early voluntary departures for new young employees. One Twentysomething described her situation: “The whole interview process was a sell job. The whole time they kept asking me if I had questions for them … I asked a lot of questions, and they gave me a lot of answers, but I realize now they were just telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, and I bought it totally. The job is not at all what they told me it was going to be.”

In a tight labor market, the pressure to hire also leads to hard selling a job to a candidate, even if that person is not ideal for the job. In fact, so many employers are so starved for young talent that they just can't bear to turn potential employees away, even in the face of huge red flags telling them, “DON'T HIRE THIS PERSON!” One tech exec told me, “We've had candidates come late for their interviews or even miss interviews, and then we hire them anyway because they look good on paper. Sometimes people will interview badly, someone will get a bad feeling, but the rest of us will talk that person into going ahead with hiring because we are just scrambling.”

The first rule of selection is: It is better to leave a position unfilled than to fill it with the wrong person. When job candidates display failings in the job selection process that would make them bad employees, these are red flags. Pay attention to red flags! They don't have to disqualify an applicant, but they should shift your presumption away from hiring the person. You should require a lot of hard evidence to overcome red flags.

The second rule of selection is: Remember, you are not the only one selecting. The employee is selecting you, too. Even after you've sold the job and the organization to a candidate with your recruiting message, the selection process is the key to closing the deal for both of you. No matter how much you may decide you want the person, if you don't make the selection process fast, you will lose a lot of very good potential Millennial employees. The hard part is that in addition to being fast, you must be rigorous. There are several ways to make your selection process fast and rigorous.

Try to Scare Them Away

Eliminate the job candidates who only think they are serious. How? After you are done selling applicants up to the door, try to scare them away. Tell them all the downsides of the job in clear and honest terms. What does that look like? Tell people, “Come work for us, and you will be expected to do more work and better work than you've ever done before. We'll keep pushing you to work longer, smarter, and faster all day, every day.” See who is left. Think about the U.S. Marine Corps recruiter who reminds the would-be Marine before he signs on the dotted line, “You realize that the thirteen-week boot camp is very tough? You'll be doing push-ups in the mud at 4:00 a.m.? Then eventually we are probably going to send you abroad into harm's way. And by the way, we don't pay very much.” You should do the same, whatever your job. If you run a warehouse, make it clear that your new young employees will carry a lot of heavy boxes. If you run an accounting firm, make it clear that your new young accountants will do a lot of repetitive document handling and put in lots of long hours. And so on.

Testing

Whoever is left after you've tried to scare them away is worth testing. In our seminars for hiring managers, we recommend testing serious job applicants to further verify their seriousness and get a quick baseline reading of their aptitude in key areas of the job for which you are considering them. Some employers believe strongly in personality tests and general aptitude tests. My own view is that even if you are using research-validated tests, the results can often be confusing to the employee and the employer. If you use these tests, make sure someone on your recruiting team knows how to really interpret them. Sometimes a trusted outside expert is your best bet.

Whatever testing method you use, try to devise a fast and penetrating test that goes quickly to the heart of the basic tasks and responsibilities the person will be expected to do if hired. If you are hiring people to do data entry, ask them to enter a bunch of data. If you are hiring people to stack boxes, ask them to stack a bunch of boxes. This doesn't mean that applicants have to know everything—or anything, for that matter—about how to do the job before they are hired. Simply asking several applicants to complete the same job-related test will give you a good idea of where they stand in relation to each other. An experienced carpenter in charge of a large crew told me, “Whenever I'm hiring a carpenter's helper, I'll have him move a stack of long boards from one place to another. I just want to see how he handles that. Does he know how to walk straight so he doesn't swing the boards around and smack into something or someone? How fast can he move them? This one little test tells me a lot, even about someone who has never been on a construction site. Some people have a natural sense about them physically, and some people don't. If you don't, you're probably not going to be very successful as a carpenter's helper. But if you can do that pretty well, then I'll sit down and talk to you.”

Another approach is to ask applicants to submit a proposal outlining exactly how they intend to add value in the organization. Give them no further guidance if you want to test their resourcefulness and their creativity and ability to operate in a sink-or-swim environment. On the other hand, if you want to see how well applicants are able to follow detailed instructions, you might give them this same assignment, but with detailed guidelines for how to complete the proposal.

Whatever test you settle on, just make sure you can implement and evaluate it with relative speed. And make sure you know in advance exactly what you are looking for. What are you testing for? Skill? Ability? Will? Work habits? Intangibles like attitude and diligence?

The Behavioral Job Interview

Then comes the job interview, the one employment selection process almost every manager does, but very few do well. Some organizations impose meticulous control over the job interview process. Usually these organizations have the best interviews because they have worked hard to develop a thorough behavioral interviewing process. Often they are smart enough to require any manager who interviews job candidates to receive training in how to conduct interviews properly. Unfortunately, such organizations are the exception. In most organizations, hiring managers have a huge amount of latitude when it comes to conducting job interviews.

Young people tell us horror stories every day about job interviews. Interviewers sometimes ask inappropriate questions like, “What was it like growing up in your family?” Or, “Do you intend to have children?” Sometimes they ask irrelevant and silly questions such as, “What can you do in the next sixty seconds that will really impress me?” But a surprising number of interviewers simply go through an applicant's résumé out loud, simply reading it, often for the first time, asking for amplification here and clarification there. Many just want to “get to know the applicant” by chatting informally about sports or clothes or classes the applicant took in college. Some blowhard interviewers actually waste the interview by doing all the talking themselves instead of hearing from the applicants. These approaches leave interviewers with little to evaluate other than whether they got a “good impression” of the interviewee. That's because too often managers who are conducting interviews have no method to their interviewing.

When it comes to interviewing, the best practice is behavioral interviewing.

Although there are entire courses taught in behavioral interviewing, I often teach it to managers in my seminars in three minutes. Behavioral interviewing simply means asking applicants to tell you a story and then listening to their story: “Tell me a story about a time you solved a problem at work.” Or, “Tell me a story about a conflict you had with another employee at work. How did you solve it?”

If you want to take behavioral interviewing to the next level, here's a simple list of questions in two main areas—performance and skills—we've developed to help managers conduct behavioral interviewing:

Performance

• Please tell me about a specific instance when you …
  • Identified a specific type of problem
  • Solved a specific type of problem
  • Accomplished a particular task
  • Were charged with a particular kind of responsibility
  • Worked in a particular type of situation
  • Worked in a particular set of conditions
  • What was successful about your approach?
  • What was unsuccessful about your approach?
  • What did you learn?
  • What would you do differently?
  • If you worked for us, you would have to do X. How would you approach the challenge?

Skill

• Please tell me about a specific instance when you used [fill in the appropriate skill].
  • What was successful about your approach?
  • What was unsuccessful about your approach?
  • What did you learn?
  • What would you do differently?
  • What ancillary skills were useful to you?
  • How have you developed this skill further since then?
  • In the specific instance you described, what related skill did you use other than the skill I asked about?
  • If you worked for us, you would have to use [fill in the appropriate skill]. How would you approach the challenge?

The Realistic Job Preview

When the new hire finally walks in your front door for the first day of work, I promise you she has a particular idea in her head of what that job is going to be like. That idea may have come from the research she has done on the Web. Or it may have come from the sales pitch she got in the recruiting process, or from her own fantasies about what she hopes the job will be like. The question is: Does that idea bear any resemblance to the real job she is going to face?

One mistake a lot of organizations make is that although they provide prospective employees with job previews, they are not realistic previews. And this goes way beyond the recruiting literature. Often employers create elaborate internship programs in order to develop prospective new employees. This is especially common in professional services firms, but it is also a practice used widely by organizations that devote any substantial resources to recruiting young talent through teachers, professors, or career counselors in schools (as you should). The problem is that internship programs are often seen as part of the recruiting campaign and not a meaningful part of the selection process. As such, many of these programs are set up to lavish especially interesting assignments on young interns and offer exposure to important decision makers, learning opportunities, and fun outings. As many associates in law firms will tell you, summer associates are often referred to by the full-time associates as “summer partners” because they are so well treated. One senior associate in a major New York City law firm said, “No wonder they are a little taken aback when they finally finish taking the bar exam and show up for work after Labor Day. We load tons of work on them and tell them they are expected to bill two thousand hours a year, and they want to know, ‘When do we get to go to the baseball game like we did when I was here last summer?’”

If your job descriptions and job posting all read like sales literature or if your internships are part of the recruiting sales process, then you need to include a realistic job preview as part of the selection process. Otherwise, the new employee's first day of work is going to be the first real preview of what the job actually looks like. And that's too late. There are few things today's young people are more sensitive to than false advertising. They will spread the word if they feel duped. If you don't create a realistic job preview for them in advance, they may create a hyper-realistic or totally unrealistic but very negative preview of your company for the world.

There are many ways to provide accurate job previews, including these:

• A probationary hiring period. This can be a few weeks in which you can try out the employee and the employee can try out the job for a while.
• A realistic internship. Make sure to assign them real tasks that mirror the actual tasks, responsibilities, and projects they will be asked to do if they accept the job. Make sure to include the grunt work.
• A “job shadow” or “tag along” with another person in your organization who is doing the same job this person will be doing if hired. This approach is sometimes used in hospitals. Make sure the would-be health care workers get to see sick patients, bedpans being emptied, and some of the other tough tasks they'll have to handle. By tagging along for several days, a week or more, your applicant will get a good picture of what the job entails. You will also get the double bonus of having the existing employee who is shadowed spend a lot of time with the applicant in the job setting. This often leads to existing employees coming in and saying, “Hey, I hope we are going to hire this person!” Or, “Hey, we are not going to hire this person, are we?” Their feedback will tell you a lot. If applicants can't job-shadow, perhaps you can give them an opportunity to watch people doing the actual job. Sometimes on factory floors or in restaurant kitchens, the best thing you can do is let a prospective employee watch people work on the line for a while.

If even that's not possible, produce a video of people in your organization performing the key tasks and responsibilities of the job, and provide an opportunity for the candidate to review the video.

• Create a print document that is the opposite of a recruiting brochure. Instead of trying to sell the job, explain exactly how a person with this job will spend his day moment by moment.
• Sometimes the best thing you can do to create a realistic job preview is encourage your employees to engage in very frank discussions with applicants in which they are not trying to sell the job but are actively trying to give a clear picture of what the job really is like.

Close the Deal Fast

Sometimes employers do a good job attracting qualified people into their applicant pool, but then create huge delays in the selection process. So please allow me to offer—one more time—the caveat I have made throughout the preceding section. As important as it is to be very selective in your hiring of young people, you also must do it fast. If you move too slowly, you will lose a lot of great hiring prospects. The two watchwords of your selection process should be rigorous and fast.

Even if you succeed in expediting your selection process, make a solid offer, and get an unconditional acceptance, your prospect is still not safely on board. Offer and acceptance does not always an iron-clad deal make. Sometimes people just change their minds. Sometimes they get cold feet. Perhaps a better offer comes their way. Or it may not be another job offer. Take, for example, this Twentysomething's story: “I had accepted an offer, set a start date that was two months down the road, and even took an advance on my pay. But some of my friends were going on this amazing trip to Latin America, and I just couldn't say no to them. When I tried to change my start date by six weeks, the company told me I couldn't. I just told them forget it. I returned the advance, and I got a great job when I got back.”

But more often, applicants just lose the interest generated during the highly engaged communication that usually characterizes the attraction and selection process. I realize that sometimes there is an unavoidable time lag between the time an offer of employment is made and accepted, and day one of the actual job. Maybe the employee needs to finish school, or the employer must complete a security screening. Whenever possible, avoid these delays because they are minefields of vulnerability in which a perfectly good hiring can go bad.

If such a delay is unavoidable, here are a few ways to keep new hires engaged and excited about joining your company:

• Maintain a high level of communication during the intervening time. Stay in touch by scheduling a series of interesting, engaging, useful communications—not just from human resources or some other anonymous corporate office—but rather from the hiring manager and the team the employee will be working with.
• Send them plenty of background material on the company, but also include polo shirts, caps, magnets, mugs, pens, and other paraphernalia that will help them show off their new job to their friends and acquaintances.
• Send actual assignments (not too time-consuming) for them to complete and return. These should not be pro forma assignments, but assignments that will help new employees jump-start the orientation process when they arrive. Are there any ongoing matters in which you could include them? Could you include them in team memos? Could you invite them (but not require them) to attend team meetings? What forms will they have to fill out when they arrive? Are there personnel lists you can provide? Is there a resource on line or otherwise so they can start to familiarize themselves with key people up the chain of command and key people on their team?
• Consider having key people on the team send e-mails or actual letters introducing themselves and explaining where they fit on the team and what, if any, working relationship they are likely to share.

All of these communication options have the effect of staying in touch with your newly hired employees. It makes them feel that they are actively transitioning to the work: they are accepted by their new workplace and being integrated into the team. It also gives them a tiny bit of a realistic job preview. Whatever you do, avoid radio silence during the intervening time between the offer and acceptance and day one. Meanwhile, never forget that day one is going to be the most important day for this new employee, so prepare for it as if the success of the hire depends on it—because it might.